Watching the Watchers
by starofoberon
Summary: The entire Unit is under arrest for corruption. Only Spencer Reid has managed to elude Ethics and Internal Affairs. Can he and his improbable partner in crime, Erin Strauss, save the team? Whole gang appears, has POV moments. FIFTEEN chapters and an Epilogue. Started serious, turned goofy fast on me.
1. The Right to Remain Silent

Usual boring disclamers, not mine, yada yada

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback is better than chocolate!

**Watching the Watchers**

_Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ~ Juvenal_

_Approximately, "Who watches over the watchers?"_

**Chapter One**

**The Right to Remain Silent**

**7:37 AM**

**David Rossi**

His bath towel still slung over his shoulders, he examined the outline of his beard for stray stubble. Stray stubble, hell; these days the most depressing problem was the encroaching _gray_ stubble.

Gray in the beard. Gray in the eyebrows. Gray in the hair.

Moira, his latest fling, said it made him look _très distingué_. Yeah, well, it also made him look like an aging beaver, but his ego would not permit him to depend on something like Grecian Formula or similar crap.

His doorbell rang.

He checked his wristwatch and frowned, then patted his freshly-shaven cheeks and headed out to the door.

Three agents stood on his doorstep. He knew two of them, solid, high-ranking, absolutely upright fellows. The third was unfamiliar, but, hell, the Bureau was huge. He couldn't know them all.

Ray Winters showed his credentials. So did the others, but Ray was the biggest surprise, because he and Rossi had worked closely together for several years, way back when. But there he was, flashing his creds like Dave was the stereotypical old broad in a polyester muumuu, answering the door with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

_Like I don't know you, Ray?_

"David Rossi?"

_Come off it. Like you don't know me?_

Nothing good will come of this, he realized. "You know me, Ray," he said quietly. "What's up?"

"May we come in?"

He stepped back from the door, "Sure. Come on in."

Was it his imagination, or was Ray looking a little self-conscious? A little sheepish?

"David Rossi," Winters said – again with the full name crap, so very official – I have to ask for your weapon and your credentials."

Rossi took his time sliding the towel off his shoulders and draped it across the back of a leather armchair. "They're in the bedroom," he replied. "Since I suspect that I'm being taken into custody, would you care to accompany me there? I can finish dressing, too."

Winters's jaw worked. "That will be satisfactory," he said.

Rossi turned to face away from the men – with some guys, he might fear a bullet in the back, but he would trust Winters under any circumstances he could dream up. Whatever was going on, it looked serious enough on the surface that Ray was ready to do this. The corollary also held true: If Ray thought there was something fishy going on, he would be solidly in Dave's corner.

"Let's go," he said. All three agents trailed him to the bedroom.

**7:43 AM**

**Penelope Garcia**

Still sipping her raspberry-kiwi smoothie, she "watched the dawn come up" – watched all the monitors, in order, sparkle to life across the business end of her techie lair.

"Penelope Garcia?" a male voice said at her door.

She turned toward a familiar face. She couldn't quite tack a name on it, but she knew she had seen him around, up on the nosebleed floors of the Hoover Building in downtown DC. The other two men with him didn't look familiar at all.

"Can I help you?"

"Would you step out here?"

Confused, but ever helpful, she said, "Of course." She set down her drink and went to the door.

"Step outside," the man said, His creds – and why was he flashing them? – identified him as a guy named Rutherford.

_I have a bad feeling about this._

"Is something wrong?" she asked. She had seen Prentiss, Reid, and Hotchner this morning but neither Morgan nor Rossi. And Kevin. She hadn't seen Kevin, but he was on loan to a White Collar Crime unit consulting in Phoenix. "Is everyone all right?"

"Yes, ma'am," Rutherford assured her. "If you'll step away from the door–"

Rutherford's two partners entered the Tech room – her Tech room – and emerged with her purse and her smoothie. One of them handed them to her. The other took a programming card from his pocket.

"Turn this way, please," Rutherford said.

Garcia stared in horror. "They're changing the lock on my office?" she managed to gasp. "What's going on?"

**7:44**

**Emily Prentiss**

The expression on Penelope's face sent chills through her body. Whatever was going on, it wasn't good. She hoped that Kevin was all right: White Collar sounded like a safe gig, an easy gig, but any UNSUB could turn mean on you, even the nerdiest.

A thick sheaf of papers fell out of one man's back pocket and onto the floor a foot or two from Emily. After a glance to ensure that nobody was looking her way, she bent and looked at the face sheet. As she did so, she could not repress a gasp.

All of them, the entire primary team, were being arrested.

_Arrested!_

She snapped her fingers softly to get Reid's attention. He looked up immediately from what he was doing. With two fingers, she indicated her eyes, then pointed the same two fingers at the stapled-together documents. Then she nudged them hard so they slid along the floor.

Reid snagged them with his own foot, glanced down, frowned deeply, and snapped the papers up.

She was about to speed-dial Morgan, but he chose that moment to stroll in, gym bag over his shoulder. That was right; the hand-to-hand class he taught had just been moved to Monday mornings.

She tried to wave to him, but he made a sharp right and started up the steps to Rossi's and Hotchner's offices.

**7:45**

**Spencer Reid**

If he had thought about it, he might have reacted differently, but the combination of the traumatized looks on Garcia's and Prentiss's faces, and the impossibly baffling cover sheet of the document he was looking at sent him into fight-or-flight mode. Still holding the papers, he slid under a nearby work table and began desperately memorizing their contents.

He concentrated on blind memorization, not analysis, but some facts leaped out at him. There was apparently a vast body of evidence indicating that the team, his team, had falsified on a grand scale the evidence they had used two months previously to bring down a pedophile ring.

_Like any of them would do such a thing!_

Several pages in the middle were techie details, URLs and file names. They were a little harder to commit to memory, but not impossible. He just had to shut out extraneous things – like watching his back.

He would have to trust Prentiss to cover for him.

By the time he was finished, he was perspiring with tension and effort.

He glanced up carefully, and saw that Emily had moved to the other end of the room. She was standing there, arms folded, watching a woman and a pair of men approach her.

With the attention of everyone in the room fixed on other things and other people, he slid the documentation back across the floor to the approximate spot where it had fallen.

It did not occur to him for a second to wait around and let the system sort itself out.

_Now all I have to do is get the hell out of here and get help._

**7:51 AM**

**Penelope Garcia**

"You'll have to come with us," Rutherford said, and although his tone was kindly, his eyes were hard.

She tried to keep the shivers out of her voice. "Where are we going?"

"To your residence," he replied. "We have a warrant here to search your apartment and to confiscate your electronics."

_No! Without my machines, I hardly exist! You can't do this to me!_

No.

"Of course I'll come along," she said, her voice suddenly deadly calm. This was combat. She would need every iota of her self control to figure out what was going on and how to fix it. Panic would just have to wait its turn in the queue.

The agent who had changed her key code patted somewhat nervously at his pockets, then he looked around – and sighed with relief. He picked up a sheaf of papers off the floor, re-folded them lengthwise, and shoved them into his back pocket.

**7:53**

**Emily Prentiss**

"Emily Prentiss?" an agent said.

Although Emily recognized three of the nine non-BAU agents now on their turf, this one was new to her. Yates, her name was. Maureen Yates.

"Yes?" she said, keeping a tight leash on her voice. "How can I help you?"

Over Yates's shoulder, Emily could see Spencer Reid creeping out from under the table and inching toward the door. She willed herself not to look at him, not to cause anyone else to look at him.

"I have to ask you for your weapon and creds," Yates said. "You're part of an ongoing investigation by Ethics and Internal Affairs."

She saw a blur of movement as Reid ducked into what had been JJ's office, then saw the reason why. Another three agents had just entered. These three swept the room with hard-eyed glances and ascended the steps toward Hotch's office.

Prentiss handed over her gun and her ID.

"On the record, just FYI, I have done nothing wrong," she told Yates. "I have nothing to fear from you."

"I hope not," Yates said, and she sounded sincere about it.

**7:55 AM**

**Derek Morgan**

"... The right to remain silent," the lead agent was intoning.

Derek just stared at him. This was a joke, right? He was never at his best on a Monday morning, and some little blonde titless wonder of a newbie agent had knocked him flat on his ass this morning, not once, but three frickin' times, in the hand-to-hand class he led, so he had no sense of humor whatsoever.

"... anything you say and and will be used against you in a court of law ..."

"And this is about _kiddie porn_?" he asked.

"This is about the ring of pedophiles operating out of Baton Rouge, agent," the lead dude, an embarrassment of an empty suit informed him. Dude would have been right at home fielding complaints about Ghostbusters or – wait, Hammer. The jerk in the latest _Iron Man_ movie. Guy was almost the spitting image of him, smarmy and self-satisfied.

He tried to remember the last time he had been in Baton Rouge. Three years ago? Four?

"... cannot afford a lawyer one can be appointed for you ..."

_I am being arrested. Here in the middle of the BAU, in front of all my brother and sister agents, like some kind of pervy freak ..._

"... tell us where we might find Agent David Rossi?" the lead dude asked.

Morgan shrugged. "Like I'm supposed to know? He's usually late on Mondays. He likes his weekends, and–"

Another agent shut off his mobile. "Winters has Agent Rossi," he told the Hammer-clone. "Picked him up at his place of residence."

_Wait, they're arresting Rossi, too? What the hell is going on here?_

"... Shouldn't think that cuffs would be necessary here," Hammer-clone said. His ID, Derek finally noticed, said _SSA Morgan Mitchell_.

_You're an embarrassment to the name Morgan, butthole..._

"I shouldn't think so, either," Morgan said, resisting the temptation to imitate the guy's Dudley Do-Right prissy tones as well as his words.

Morgan Mitchell nudged him toward the door, with the other two bringing up the rear, the better to make sure he cooperated. From there, they could draw handguns or jump him from behind or just keep him from breaking into a run. It wasn't cuffs, but it might as well have been cuffs.

He could see Emily Prentiss, in the center of the bullpen, engaged in intense conversation with three other agents.

_Man, I do not like this one bit ..._

**7:59 AM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

He had been aware for the last few minutes of unusual activity down in the bullpen, but Monday mornings often brought random requests and deliveries of forensic reports, so he had not yet become concerned.

When the three big shots from Hoover appeared at his door, he stood up. "Gentlemen?"

"Aaron Hotchner?"

_OK, that isn't good. Avery has known me for at least ten years. _

"Yes," he replied.

"Stewart Avery, Ethics and Internal Affairs. Please surrender your weapons and creds."

For things already to be at this level, there had to be at least one indictment already in play. Which sounded grim, but Hotchner knew the truth of the old saw that any decent prosecutor can get an indictment of a ham sandwich. It's the trial that matters.

Wordlessly, he placed his credentials and his weapons on the surface of the desk. Both of them. No silly tricks about forgetting the backup gun. If this was more than just him, if it threatened his team, then the only way for him to play it was absolutely aboveboard.

With Avery beside him and the other two agents behind them, he left the office. Prentiss was standing by her work station down in the bullpen, shutting down her terminal and collecting her purse.

A new trio of agents entered the BAU offices.

_This place is getting crowded._

The lead guy looked around, then walked directly to Reid's station and looked around again.

"He isn't here yet," Prentiss called across to the new agents. "He isn't much of a Monday person."

And yet Hotch could see Spencer Reid, barely visible behind the tinted glass of JJ's office.

He froze in his tracks.

"Prentiss, he said, his voice raised.

She looked up at him.

"Have you seen Rossi?"

She took in his situation, saw it was like hers. "No, sir, not yet."

"Come on," Avery told him. "You don't need to talk to anyone."

Hotchner backed up a little further.

Avery turned toward him. "Come on, Aaron," he said quietly. "Don't make this hard. You know better than that."

He faced the railing and scanned the lower area as though in search of someone.

"We don't have to do this the hard way, do we?" Avery repeated.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hotchner saw Reid disappear and saw the door to the outer hallway close behind him.

He repressed a sigh of relief. _About time, damn it._

"No, sorry," he said in a distracted voice. "I won't cause you any trouble, Stewie."

**8:05 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

Moving slowly, keeping out of the way but trying not to look furtive, he made his way through the halls. When he came to his target office, he knocked sharply on the door post.

"Come in, Agent Reid," the familiar voice said.

He did so, and without invitation closed the door behind himself.

"You know that this is a crock of shit," he said firmly. He was rarely so outspoken in the presence of authority, but this was his _team_, damn it. "I know that you and Hotch have had some issues, but the whole team deserved better than this–"

"Better than what?"

"Just taking everyone into custody. Shutting us down, locking Garcia out of her office."

"What on earth are you talking about?" Chief Strauss asked.

"We're all being taken into custody," he told her. "Arrested. Everyone who's here, anyway. Garcia, Hotchner, Morgan, and Prentiss. They came after me, but I slipped out." He glared at her, silently daring her to call in the troops to haul him away, too.

"But what's the charge?"

"Falsifying evidence for profit."

Erin Strauss's complexion paled and her eyes narrowed. "For _profit!_" she all but spat. "Go lock that door, Agent Reid, and quickly. Aaron and I may have our differences, but he is entirely honorable. _All_ of you are entirely honorable. No order like that came from me or through me – which almost certainly means they think I may be involved, too. Otherwise, why cut me out of the loop?"

Reid nodded. "Then you're probably one of the two unindicted co-conspirators."

Sourly, Strauss said, "Wouldn't surprise me in the least."


	2. Passenger Pigeons plus Penelope

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback is better than chocolate!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Two**

Passsenger Pigeons, plus Penelope

**8:28 AM**

**Emily Prentiss**

It was a long drive through heavy traffic to the Hoover Building in downtown DC. Emily sat in the back seat of a Bureau sedan between Maureen Yates and the more junior male who had accompanied her. She was getting a trapped kind of feeling, as though the walls of the car were closing in on her.

"Do you have any questions?" Yates asked, way too casually.

"Isn't the sky pretty," Prentiss said, "the way the light slants through those clouds to the east?"

"You know that I'll help you in any legal way I can."

"When I was a little girl," Emily continued, "I used to think that those rays of light were God reaching down to talk to people. I always wondered when he would talk to me."

"Because the sisterhood has to stick together," Yates finished.

"Yes, you do have a vagina, don't you? Such a coincidence! And that just makes us _sooo_ close, doesn't it, Agent Yates?"

Yates flinched and blinked. "Jesus, Prentiss, you have no idea how hard I fought so they wouldn't call out the press there and make you do the perp walk."

"Yates, if you were a real agent, you would know that a perp walk is nothing next to the crap we deal with on a daily basis." Emily was beginning to entertain notions of resisting a little bit of arrest, just so she could slap some of the stupid sincerity off Yates's face. She would lose, but she would feel so much better ...

"I'll bet that boss of yours would hate it, though," Yates continued smoothly. "Those guys in their suits and blow-dried hair, those pretty boys with authority, the Suits, they don't do humiliation well."

_Well, that wasn't much of rapport-builder, either, toots_.

"First mistake most people make about Hotch," Emily said sweetly, "is to presume that because he wears a suit, he is a Suit. Often as not, it's the last mistake they ever get a chance to make."

"And what's with the chick in the clown getup?"

"Maureen, Penelope Garcia is the very last person in the world you ever want to fuck with. _Ever_. And I advise you to listen to this warning, because after she messes you up, all of the rest of us who love her will be lining up to mess up anything that's left. And when everyone is done, you'll run away screaming every time you see a redhead with cat glasses. You'll have nightmares about troll dolls and feathers and paisley. And no, that's not a threat. It's just a prediction."

**8:33 AM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

There were no cuffs or chains on him, but there might as well have been, since he had been placed in the back seat of an official vehicle, with an agent on either side of him.

"I notice," Stewart Avery said from his right side, "that you haven't asked for any details about these allegations yet."

"I'm exercising my right to remain silent," Hotchner told him frostily, and said nothing else.

_Falsifying evidence, my ass. _

If they thought for so much as an instant that he would say another unnecessary word to anyone, including his own mother, without his lawyer at his side, they had become idiots, the way so many other agents did once they got a whiff of administrative power.

_What do I know?_

_Prentiss is in custody. _

God help them. If ever there was a woman capable of turning her jailers inside-out, either physically or psychologically – or both – should she choose to do so, it was Emily Prentiss. Hotch himself would think twice before taking her on. If they pissed her off enough, they would reap the whirlwind. She might go down, but she would by-God go down fighting.

_Garcia, of all people, is apparently in custody._

That one disturbed him deeply. Penelope was scary-smart and talented, but she was also sweet and trusting. She looked for, and, bless her, she generally found, the best in every person. She was no agent and she had no training in resisting interrogators. She would be confused, and maybe afraid to count on her own native good sense.

_Reid, if he's lucky, if we're all lucky, is in the wind. _

And he had completed all his regular training, and he was also scary-smart, but he was psychologically damaged and he had never scored impressively on the physical side of the job. But he could analyze. Damn, that boy could analyze.

_Morgan is in custody._

That was the person whom Hotchner would have preferred to see in the wind. Working outside the box, Derek was absolutely brilliant. He could have been such a spy, as his undercover record proved. Face to face on the wrong side of an interrogation, not so perfect a fit. Still, he was immovable when he chose to be.

_Rossi: always late on Mondays. Whereabouts unknown._

They might have picked him up at home. Still – Morgan and his keepers had emerged from Rossi's office together. Maybe they went in for Dave and came out with Derek? If he was in custody, he would be fine, a consummate pro. Hell, he could give his keepers fits if he chose to do so.

Aaron hoped that he chose to do so. For himself, his role at this party was to stay straight up, all Unit Chief and former prosecutor, and maintain confidence that the rest of the team did whatever they did best.

He trusted his ability to just sit there and take whatever they threw at him. Sooner or later, they would get frustrated. They would pitch something that inadvertently opened up a new lead. That was all he was living for at the moment: a direction.

Not the pedo ring – nope, not enough profit in it, he reasoned. More likely, any continued investigation would turn up a kiddie porn empire. That's where the money would be, lots of it, and that's probably the power fueling this judicial travesty, so it will look like some other entity. A civil rights issue, for instance. Porn merchants generally had natural allies in the freedom of speech communities.

He began reviewing old cases in his head, compiling a list of names and entities likely to show up if he was analyzing this correctly. Hands still folded serenely in his lap, he began to outline his plan of attack. Not so much as a twitch of a finger or an eyebrow reflected that he was already on the hunt.

**8:37 AM**

**Derek Morgan**

He gained some small satisfaction from "hulking." The two agents who shared the back seat of the Bureau sedan with him both tended to the pudgy side. Morgan had not an ounce of fat on him, but his muscles bulged. And the advantage that muscles have over fat is that they can voluntarily expand.

(Although he seemed to recall at least a couple of his girlfriends bitching that their butt-fat expanded so their pants fit right one minute and were too tight later. Which of course begged the question, is there such a thing as pants that are too tight?)

Regardless, Derek sat very still and concentrated on his shoulder and upper arm muscles. While he did not in fact become the Incredible Hulk, it was perceptibly more crowded for his chaperones when he did so, and they scootched to the side.

Having produced a little more wiggle room for himself, he began reviewing the potential problems he and the team faced. That the charge might be correct, for any one of them at all, could be dismissed on its face. None of them was superhuman, although each one was probably a whole lot closer to that ideal than the average person was.

They all had weaknesses.

Rossi could trip over his own ego, although how anyone could miss anything that massive was beyond Morgan.

Baby Girl could be sidelined by tears of empathy or anger, and she was probably just a hair more protective of her operating sysrtems than she was of her team mates.

Prentiss could be blindsided by her need to prove her toughness, to prove she was one of the guys. Also by her biological clock if children were involved.

(As could he. Hell, he hadn't known that a guy could have a biological clock, or baby-hunger, or whatever you want to call it, until he found himself obsessing over Ellie's well-being.)

Reid tended to identify with anyone who had been bullied by his peers – plus, he was a crappy shot and nobody in his right mind would bet on him at hand-to-hand.

Hotchner would always position himself between his team and any threat to it, even if he was laughably unqualified for the job in that moment, unless someone had the courage to second-guess him.

(Which, again, was Derek's job.)

But not a one of them – EVER – would falsify evidence, even to nail the Antichrist himself. And certainly never for personal profit. You could take that to the freakin' bank.

And for now, Morgan considered himself in undercover mode, deep in enemy territory, disguised as a person of interest who was in custody. He would be a creature of major cooperation and minor annoyances.

He leaned to his left and murmured in Agent King's ear, "Think we could hit the drive-thru and pick up a couple breakfast sandwiches? Maybe a juice? I'm hungry as hell."

**8:39**

**David Rossi**

"Uh-oh, Ray," their driver said, indicating a tight knot of press vans in the alley most adjacent to the Hoover Building. "How did the word get out?"

Yeah, big surprise, Rossi sighed to himself. He thought probably Ray Winters genuinely was surprised, sitting there red-faced and fumbling with his cell phone. That made Rossi one up on him, because as they got closer to the downtown area, David had become sure that the PTB would have the press out there. The driver, at the very least, had expected this. Otherwise, he would have approached the building from the other direction.

Ray had always been way too trusting of his superiors.

The sedan arrived at its choke point, and the four agents climbed out.

_Could be worse; could be cuffed._

The way the game was usually played, the perp would duck his head and try to avoid the cameras and the microphones. His federal guards would drag their heels a little to give the prisoner the maximum exposure. It was intended to shame and intimidate the perp as well as to remind the general public that their law enforcement personnel were tracking 'em down and bringing 'em in.

No matter what he did or how he reacted, Rossi would look bad. Some people saw feds and a man of Italian ancestry – especially a well-dressed one – and automatically thought, _mobster_. Hell, he'd had that kind of fallout when he was one of the good guys, bringing in the perps. When he was young, he had let it bother him.

Now, he knew how to work it in his favor.

David Rossi, legendary agent, best-selling author, profiling expert, defied expectations yet again. With his warmest, most engaging smile, he deliberately turned toward every camera, every microphone. "So glad you could be here," he actually said to the guy from Fox. "I'm happy to demonstrate my faith in the system. Thank you, all of you, for doing your duty to keep the public informed." Shamelessly, he pumped the hands of various news correspondents whom he knew personally. "Larry, good to see you. How's that baby? Suzanne! Love the hair!"

"Stop it," Ray stage-whispered at him. "You're making a fool of yourself, Dave."

"Yes," he replied, "and you, too. A bitch, ain't it? – Hey, Bucky!" he continued at a local newsman. "These intrepid G-men are Ray Winters, Gil Hoskins, and Frank Glowacki. Give them a little face time! Come on, smile for the cameras, guys! Wave and say 'Hi, Mom!'"

In a week, or whenever his name was cleared, the public would not associate him with this man making his flamboyant entrance. In their minds, this grinning, glad-handing, press-friendly dude would be some Cosa Nostra slime ball the feds brought in the other week.

Or that was the idea, anyway.

**8:50 AM**

**Penelope Garcia**

In a sense it was like a rape, sitting there in her living room and watching these Ethics jerks taking apart her computer setup, filling boxes with disks and flash drives and hard drives and anything that looked even moderately technical. She was determined not to let any of her distress show, however.

She tried to keep herself occupied by reading the search warrant repeatedly, trying to make sense out of some of the less familiar legalese. Her logic was that if this document could be used against her, then potentially something like it could be used against them.

_Them._

Weird. She hadn't thought of the FBI as a _them_, as the enemy, for almost eight years.

There was that one funny moment when the guy who had reprogrammed the electronic lock on her door had tried to sit down in the wicker rocker in the corner. She had a small collection of plush kittens covered with real fur from some of her grandmother's coats, and Derek had given her a sort of whoopee cushion that meowed loudly.

Poor guy must have jumped about three feet when the "kittens" started to mew.

Rutherford laughed even louder than Penelope did, and took a few minutes to admire the handcrafting and the noisemaker. He seemed to be making an effort to be straight and fair with her. Yeah, and that and $3.65 would get you a macchiato.

She had not spent eight years with the BAU without learning about things like creating rapport. Hell, even before the Feds, she had done it as part of her, um, interesting past. They called it social engineering, and she had freakin' _rocked_ social engineering.

She would get through this. She would get through this and come out on the other side and she would spend the rest of her existence reconstructing her life and the lives of the team, her team. And if she had time left, she would devote it to ruining whoever did this to them.

The agents filled out more forms on more clipboards and packed up yet another of her babies, her best friends, those bundles of software and semiconductors that supplied her livelihood and her connection to the world. Her fingers closed around one of her happy little pens, this one with a laughing daisy head on it.

_Will not cry. _

_Look at the daisy._

_Will not cry._

**9:03 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

He had been talking for the better part of an hour, actually dictating, line by line, the contents of that arrest warrant to Erin Strauss – who had rolled up her sleeves and was keying everything in almost as fast as he could say it.

He had often wondered exactly how she had earned her position of authority within the Bureau. Apparently her FBI Super Power was typing, he thought with a grin.

She was using her personal laptop and she had disabled the modem. Anyone who wanted to read what she was writing would have to gain physical control of the machine. Nobody could hack into it. Well, they could, using technologies more often used by the CIA and the NSA, but both Reid and Strauss calculated that as traumatic as the arrests were to the team, they were probably not all that important to the Bureau. If so, they would have locked down that sector of the building when Reid went missing.

He would have showed up on several security cameras before the Ethics and Internal Affairs people arrived, so they surely knew he was there.

At that exact moment there was a knock on Chief Strauss's door.

Erin got up and walked to the door. "Who is it?" she asked.

"Nora," the Section secretary said. "I really need to talk to you." Nora was passionately loyal to Strauss, a connection the members of the unit had never fully understood.

Strauss sighed. "Dear, I'm having one of _those_ problems again, you know what I'm talking about? Can this wait?"

"Ma'am? Have you heard the news?"

"News?"

"Hotchner's unit, ma'am. It's all over the news. They've all been arrested, I saw Agent Rossi on TV when they were taking him into the Hoover Building, and some other agents called and asked whether you were in."

"Well, it's about time they told me what's going on."

A momentary hesitation. "Ma'am, they told me not to tell you that they called."

Spencer Reid found himself in the peculiar position of exchanging sympathetic glances with Erin Strauss.

"And what did you tell them?" she asked, very quietly.

Some hemming and hawing from the other side of the door. "I told them I'm expecting you in after lunch, that you took some personal time this morning."

"Thank you, Nora," Strauss said, even more quietly. "We are being railroaded, all of us. A few extra hours will help us get legal assistance."

"Oh, and ma'am?"

Erin's lips tightened as if to say,_ Oh God, what next? _"Yes?"

"Ma'am, I think I saw one of Hotchner's people up here earlier – the skinny kind of spooky and geeky one, you know?"

"Thank you again, Nora. I'll be on the lookout."

After Nora left, Reid looked at Strauss. "'Spooky'?" he repeated. "Really?"

Strauss waved an annoyed hand. "Oh, God knows. Agent Reid, we need to get out of here."

Spencer longed to intone, _Who is this 'we' that you refer to? _His better judgment took over, however, and he just said, "Any ideas?"

"No," she said. "I have no experience in either breaking into or out of buildings."

_Yeah, but you can type like a sonuvabitch ... _

"What's the matter?" she added, as he held up his forefinger.

"Hang on, I think I have an idea," he said. He considered it from all angles. Yes. It would work. He took out his cell phone and hit number one on his speed dial.

**9: 04 AM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

Hotchner was actually startled when his cell phone went off. He thought that he had put it on vibrate, but obviously he had not.

"No problem," Avery said. "Go ahead and take it."

He took it from his jacket and bit his lip hard when he saw the faceplate.

S_pencer Reid_, it announced.

_Crap. _

_Sonuvabitch is a genius, so he runs away and then calls me?_

There was no way to avoid this. If he decided to let it go to voice mail, his custodians, who urgently wanted the young doctor and were watching Aaron's every move like a pair of Brooks Brothers-clad hawks, would want to know why.

Wishing this weren't happening, he pressed Talk. "Hotchner," he growled into the phone.

"Just calling to apologize for being late," Reid said. His voice was a little higher than usual, reflecting his tension and concern. "I bit down wrong on something this morning, and I have a dental appointment. I should be in later today. I mean, if we have a case, I'll drop everything, but otherwise–"

"No case," he said dryly, relieved that the kid was covering his tracks. If he hadn't with his own eyes seen Reid sneaking off, he would believe that he was being honest. "Take care of that tooth."

"Thanks," Reid said, and he continued to speak quickly, babbling the way he did when he was uncomfortable. "I mean, you've been there. You know what I'm going through. I don't want to lose little pieces of it. I'd rather that he just pulls it all. That's pretty important. You know what I mean?"

_That was a strange thing to say. _"Of course," Aaron told him, although he had no idea in the world what Spencer was getting at. 

_Just when I think things can't get any more surreal ..._

Reid rang off. Hotchner closed his phone and put it away. "Reid's going to the dentist," he said. "Should I have told him to come in?"

"No," Avery reassured him. "We'll catch up with him at home. Unless you happen to know the name of his dentist?"

"Sorry, no."

And then it hit him: The second message was for him, in one of those stupid puns that Reid favored when he was nervous or he'd been drinking.

He wants "the whole tooth" to come out.

He bent over, rested his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands, fighting an urge to laugh so painful that it bordered on hysteria.

"You all right, Aaron?" Avery asked, genuine concern in his voice.

"Yeah," he managed to answer.

_Will. Not. Laugh._

"Tired. Confused. Unhappy. But all right."

_Should I be more worried about him, because of his stupid message, or more worried about myself because I actually understood it?_

_Whole tooth. Oh, Christ ..._


	3. Skipping Out of High School

Usual boring disclamers, not mine, yada yada

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback is better than chocolate!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Three**

**Like Skipping Out of High School**

**9:07 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

"I'm guessing that if we tried to access the blueprints of this building, some alarm would go off somewhere," Reid said.

"Could be," Chief Strauss conceded. "But if they were that obsessed with whatever this thing is, they would have blocked off parts of the building. And sounded a general alarm. And they wouldn't have been so quick to believe Nora when she said that I was taking personal time."

"You have a point there, but do you really want to take the gamble?"

Strauss's brows narrowed and her nostrils flared. It was a pretty weird combination effect. "Middle management," she said at last, a satisfied smile on her face. "It's going to come in handy. Who'd a thunk it?"

Rather than admit that he was completely at sea, Spencer offered her an encouraging look.

"All these godawful regulations," she said. "Millions of trees have died in the name of compliance with all these godawful – and sometimes contradictory – federal regulations. And it's never the unit-level workers who have to chase this stuff down, and it's never the way high ups. It's us poor joes and josinas in the middle. Look at that," she continued, her arm sweeping toward shelves jammed with neatly arranged notebooks in various colors, with various ID codes on their spines. "Dead trees, millions of them. And after all these years, they're about to come in handy. Somewhere, somebody in middle management hell should be setting off fireworks."

She glared at the notebooks for a moment, then selected the first in a row of gunmetal gray volumes. She opened it, consulted its index, replaced it, and took down the eighth volume in the series. "Check it out," she said, and grinned hugely.

He gazed down at the vinyl-sleeved floor plans she presented. "What – oh, it's the fire-evacuation plans for–"

"For every floor," she finished. "So let's plan our manner of egress."

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

"I like spy movies," she told him calmly. "This floor first?"

**9:11 AM**

**Emily Prentiss**

Some bland suit with a high forehead and a Duquesne University class ring read her her rights again.

"Just let me get this clear," she said as she initialed the sheet. "Obviously, I'm in custody and you have a formal indictment out there, but so far, no fingerprinting and no booking photo. Just you and me all chummy in here. So, am I actually under arrest, or are we just talking?"

"If you're impatient to complete the arrest process, we can certainly accommodate you," he replied, "but prior to booking and arraignment, I wanted to offer you the opportunity to cooperate with the investigation. It's a courtesy."

_Yeah, I can tell, buddy._

"Ah, I see," she replied. "Whom on the team would you like me to incriminate?"

"'Incriminate' is such a loaded word," her interrogator said, and she laughed out loud, because all she could hear was dozens of movie villains purring things like _Blackmail is such an ugly word_.

"Let's call a spade a freakin' shovel, shall we, Mr.–" she peered at his ID badge "–Mr. Eddowes? What kind of trade are we talking about here?"

"So far, Agent Prentiss, nobody has mentioned a trade."

"Mmm." She beamed at him. "So why are we here?"

"For someone who claims to know nothing about the allegations against you, you seem remarkably uninterested in the details of the accusations. I find that interesting."

She sighed. "OK, if that's the way you want to play it, fine. Agent Yates tells me that I'm accused of taking a bribe to falsify testimony against a ring of pedophiles in Baton Rouge two, almost three months ago. You're right, I'm interested. How much did I allegedly get for this alleged perjured testimony?"

Eddowes opened a fat file folder and spread out bank and ATM statements before her. "We have evidence that you received one hundred thousand dollars," he said smoothly. "That's at bare minimum."

She raised an eyebrow. "Really! I wish I had known about that when I scraped together the down payment for my new car." She turned the documents around so they faced her and began to read them, and felt a chill run through her.

It was all there: A hundred grand, in three payments of thirty, thirty, and forty thousand dollars, into a bank account at a bank where she did not ordinarily do business. Her signature, however, was a perfect forgery. If she had seen it out of context, she would have insisted that it was her own. The security question and answer she had allegedly provided was indeed an obscure fact about her upbringing, one that she doubted that even anyone on her team would have guessed correctly about her – and not one she had used for anything else, ever.

More damning, there were several other, more modest transactions at two ATMs. Both of the machines were located near her residence. The security cameras had captured her on five different dates, making four withdrawals and a deposit – including her private habit of holding her billfold in her teeth while she operated the machine.

"Jesus," she breathed. "I thought this was some sloppy frame-up job. This is professional. This is – scary shit, Mr. Eddowes. I've changed my mind. I want to engage an attorney."

"Now, Ms Prentiss–"

"That's it," she said. "Attorney. Now. I am shutting down. I will say no more."

"I was only wondering what Agent Hotchner might have done that would be worth more than three times what you were paid–"

"Lawyer," she said, in the most sickly-sweet voice she could summon.

**9:22 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

He and Chief Strauss strolled down the hall companionably, looking like colleagues deep in conference, which was pretty much what they were anyway. Their ultimate goal was the executive cafeteria, but Strauss wanted to make a stop at another administrator's office before they left that floor of the building.

"Here," she said, and actually took him by the hand and pulled him into an office that reminded him of that office in the Harry Potter movie with all the cat plates on the wall. Cat prints, a cat tapestry, ceramic and pewter cats and kittens. Photos of a tortie, two Russian blues, and a Scottish fold in various cute poses. It was totally creepy.

"Close the door," she directed.

"Whose office is this?"

Erin Strauss named someone Reid had never heard of. She sat down in the woman's chair and drew her laptop out of her bag. She hooked it up, quickly and efficiently, to a printer and began printing out several pages. As the pages ran, she picked up the obsessive cat lover's landline phone and punched in a number.

"Ah, Ms Jareau," she said into the handset. "Erin Strauss, dear." her lips tightened. "Yes, dear, that's why I'm calling. It's a travesty and a frame-up. I'm here with Agent Reid, and we're trying to – yes, we know that they're looking for him. They'll be looking for me shortly, too, I'm sure. Look, dear, we don't have much time, but what I need from you is a fax number that isn't yours, but you can get access to. Yes, of course I can wait."

"I'm on hold," Strauss told Spencer. "What I want to do is fax her the computer data from the middle of the indictment, so when we find Ms Garcia, we can – yes, dear, thank you." She wrote down some numbers and read them back. "Yes, I'll start transmission now. You can talk to Agent Reid while I send them. Yes, seven pages. Just fold them up and hide them somewhere until we know where they should be sent."

She handed the phone to Reid, who felt almost pathetically grateful to hear the voice of a friend. "So how do you like it so far at the DoD?" he asked her.

"A challenge," she said. "Sort of fun. The people aren't as nice, but nobody dies. That's a small plus, but a plus. I saw Rossi on the news – all those people who live to pass on bad news, they've been in my office for the past hour, telling me how lucky I was to have got out before the unit was exposed as this – I wanted to puke, Spence. I'm not much of one for schadenfreude, but it's like the corporate disease here. How did you manage to avoid getting arrested?"

"I sneaked out," he admitted, feeling more cowardly than clever. "I hid under a desk, then in your old office, then I ran for Strauss."

"What on earth made you go to her? She seems almost human today."

"I couldn't think of anyone else who would have both the power and the knowledge." Erin waved a hand. "Here she is," he said.

"Well, good luck to both of you," JJ said as he passed the phone back to the Section Chief.

"Yes, dear," Erin said to JJ. "Eventually I hope to get back to you and give you another number so you can pass those documents along. I wanted to make sure that if anyone is watching my phone and fax and your phone and fax, it won't be quite as obvious as it could be. I am so very grateful, dear. My best to you and your darling little boy."

Strauss hung up. As she packed up her computer, she said, "On to the cafeteria?"

**9:31 AM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

"Yes, Aaron," Jamie sighed. "I've taken care of it. Everyone but Mr. Rossi has accepted the lawyer I recommended for him. Or her. Rossi has his own. Ms Garcia has not been taken into custody, but I sent someone over just to hold her paw. She's pretty disoriented and, well, troubled."

Hotch nodded. Although he had never actually needed a criminal lawyer before, he had known Jamie for years, and he trusted him completely. Jamie was the kind of guy who could be counted on to go the extra mile. He had even sent someone to Hotch's place to be present while the search warrant was executed.

_I feel like a fucking criminal._

"I'm in danger of being my own worst enemy here," he confessed. "I know that if I don't watch it I'm going to try to take control of the interview, and I know that it isn't in my best interests."

"I'm glad you recognize that – it'll make it easier for you to keep it under wraps," Jamie said. "Right now, we really want them to talk. We want to see what they have on you – what they think they have on you," he corrected smoothly, "and we want to give them the barest minimum from our point of view.

"Meanwhile, I have to warn you, they're going to ask a sky-high bail, arguing that you've betrayed the public trust."

Hotchner sighed. He had anticipated that. "I have some resources, Jamie, but nothing spectacular." In fact he wasn't absolutely positive how he was going to pay Jamie if this thing dragged on endlessly.

"You have less than that right now, because your accounts have been frozen."

_Right_.

"At least the three-hundred thou you're supposed to have–"

Aaron stared. "three hundred thousand dollars?"

Jamie looked at him in surprise. "Didn't they tell you–"

"Dear God in heaven," Hotch breathed, chilled to his marrow. "it's bad enough that they think I would – sell myself, sell my integrity. But for three hundred thousand – Jesus, I sure sold myself cheap, didn't I?"

Jamie chose to ignore the bitterness. "When it comes to bail, you can certainly – you still own the house that you and Haley–"

Aaron dragged his mind back to the problem at hand. "Yes."

"That's a nice piece of property. We'll take it as it comes, and we'll come through OK on the other end." He patted Aaron's arm reassuringly.

Aaron found himself sorely tempted to protest his innocence to Jamie, which was a pointless thing to do. Jamie knew him well, knew his character, but he was also a defense attorney. Most of his clients were guilty, and almost all of them claimed to be innocent. Client claims did not move him; evidence and strategy moved him. Better not even to raise the subject. He needed to keep a lid on his outrage and just let Jamie do what he did best.

Stew Avery himself came to the door to summon them for the interview. He had been going out of his way to make sure Aaron was treated with dignity, even to ordering their driver to use the other entrance when he saw the media circus ahead of them. Aaron was hyper alert to the way he was always bracketed by several agents and police so that if he were stupid enough to break for the door they could run him down easily.

He had to remind himself that it wasn't that they thought that he was stupid. It was that a lot of crooks _were_ stupid, and this was just their way.

_Way to go, Hotchner. You're more upset that they're treating you like you might be dumb than that you might be guilty? Good thing you have Jamie to talk for you, champ._

**9:44 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

The executive cafeteria was all but empty.

"Keep relaxed," Spencer told her. "People are wired to read tension and insecurity. That's one of the things that predators watch for."

"I know all about that, even without being a profiler," Strauss replied. "I was an ace at sneaking out of my high school classes. I would stroll right out of there, right past the guidance counselors' offices, and nobody would give me a second look."

He eyed her sideways. "You're just full of surprises, aren't you?"

"I hope so, Agent Reid."

They made their way across the tiled floor and paused by the sliding glass doors to a small terrace. "You'll excuse me, ma'am," Spencer said, slipping one arm around her waist, "but a little public display of affection can deflect and distract."

"What's the difference?"

"_Deflect_ refers to the people who look away. _Distract_ refers to the people who keep looking at us and think, Oh, isn't that cute – or disgusting – or unprofessional – or just so wrong – but they only think of us in context of a relationship."

She sniffed. "I could have done without most of those adjectives."

"Live with it. Most people are judgmental bastards." He slid one door to the right and the two of them moved through the opening and out onto the terrace. "Cold out here," he observed. "Clear to the far corner now."

She moved with him. "That's steeper than I thought it would be."

"It is, isn't it?" He peered over the railing and looked down at the slanted ground beneath them. "Let me go first, and I'll help you get down."

She nodded, her lips compressed tightly.

Reid swung his legs over the railing, looked where he was going, and slid off his buttocks to the grass a few feet below him. In spite of his effort to stay upright, he lost his footing on the incline and fell sideways down the hill. When he got back to his feet, dusting grass and leaves from his clothing, he saw Erin Strauss's shoes on the ground. Rather than drop from a sitting position, she held on to the railing with her hands and dangled three feet above he ground, then let herself fall.

She, too, lost her footing, and her arms pinwheeled as she struggled to remain upright. Reid caught her and held her vertical. When she recovered her balance, she bent down and put her shoes on.

"It looks easier in the movies," she said with a rueful grimace.

"Everything looks easier in the movies," Spencer replied.


	4. And Like Herding Cats

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

[Did anyone notice that I misspelled "disclaimers" on Chapters 1 through 3?

I didn't notice, and neither did my trusty beta!]

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback lights up my life and is better than chocolate!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Four**

**And Like Herding Cats**

**9:58 AM**

**David Rossi**

"What I don't get," Rossi said to his interviewer, "is who would pay to falsify evidence in order to _incriminate_ a pedo ring. Seems to me that if we had been on the take, we would have been falsifying _exculpatory_ evidence. I mean, speaking as someone who has spent extended periods of my life investigating people who have falsified evidence, I'm having trouble figuring out who the hell the money man would have been in this case.

"A church, maybe, or some family-first religious entity, maybe, but would they have the ready cash? And the sophistication to pull off this fairly sophisticated payment scheme? Not to mention that they would be suborning perjury and fraud, two sins that I think are pretty well covered in the Bible as no-nos.

"You see what I'm saying? Before you even get to the subject of, _if we had been made this offer, would we have entertained it for even a split second_, you have this problem. Who in the hell would even make this offer? The whole setup stinks. It makes no sense. It's idiotic."

To his left, he could see and hear his lawyer making shut-the-hell-up noises and gestures, but David Rossi was on a tear and nobody was going to dissuade him.

"It must frustrate you sometimes," his interviewer said, determined to give dissuasion his best shot, "to have the important decisions about the unit made, not by a profiling legend like yourself, but by a slick administrator."

"Oh, now, you see, you're just getting yourself in deeper," Rossi said. "Because if your brilliant strategy is to play me against Aaron Hotchner, you're out of your goddamned mind. What makes Aaron an outstanding administrator – and the perfect man to run the unit – is his sense of fairness. Herding profilers is like herding cats, only more dangerous, and he makes it look easy, and he's a pretty fair profiler himself.

"Aaron is the last man in the world who would fall for a deal like this – and I'm including myself there. No, Don, don't shut me up. These guys have their heads up their asses."

The interviewer leaned forward. "I hate to shatter that impressive speech, Agent Rossi, but this was a federal sting operation, and we have you and your pet administrator right in the middle of it."

"Oh, bullshit," Rossi said with a dismissive laugh. "You couldn't offer Hotch enough money to falsify his lunch expenses, for God's sake, and this two hundred thou that I'm supposed to have bent over for – have you checked my royalties lately? My financial records? Let's get real here, buddy boy. I wouldn't cross the street for a measly two hundred large."

"David, you are not helping," his lawyer hissed at him. "You aren't helping yourself, and you aren't helping your coworkers."

_Maybe not_, Rossi thought, _but I can see it in this asshole's eyes: He's scared that he has backed the wrong horse. He's about three feet from flop sweat._

"I'm not done, Donnie," he snapped. "Not by a long shot." But because it was often good to alter the rhythm of an interrogation, he smiled toothily at the interviewer. "Can we just move along to booking now? Because the fun is just starting, my friend. It's just starting."

**10:14 AM**

**Derek Morgan**

Part of his confusion had passed; he had figured out the Baton Rouge connection. No, he had not been there for almost three years, but he had been in New Orleans three months earlier – he and Prentiss has remained there, chasing local leads while Rossi and Hotchner drove up to the capital city and Reid and a couple local field agents covered connections at LSU.

It was like so many other things in southern Louisiana: If it showed up in one location, it would be in all three, a triangle, for good and for evil. And sure as shit, before long bodies had popped up (almost literally) in all three places.

But what could they possibly have falsified? It was all there – DNA, fingerprints, all the trace evidence that had to suffice when the victims were too young, too frightened, or too damaged to testify.

The only thing he could figure was that the accusation was the pedophile ring's last ditch effort at not becoming hate-bait in prison. But, God, they must have incredible contacts, because the case against him, personally, Derek Morgan, who was third-generation law enforcement in his family, seemed pretty freakin' airtight just to look at it.

The presence of Norma, the lawyer whom Hotch's attorney had sent over, made him feel slightly more secure than he might have felt otherwise. He kept staring from one bank statement to another, from one ATM security cam still to another, shaking his head and trying to make sense of it all.

There was one shot in particular that jangled him, and he was not sure why. The figure in the picture was clearly him. Although his face was partially obscured by a Chicago Bears ball cap, he recognized not only his own body type, but the clothing he was wearing, and even the intersection at which he was standing. Four banks stood within seventy feet of one another there. His bank and the bank at which he was supposed to be standing were side by side on one side of Dunhill Road. On the opposite side stood two other banks.

He kept returning to that shot. Yes, there was construction in the background. There had been construction at that intersection for two months, on and off. Mostly storm sewer upgrading, if he recalled correctly. The dates of the construction were consistent with the date that picture was taken.

But Tuesday, October fifth.

Why did that bother him? What should he be remembering?

"May I have copies of these photos and bank statements?" he asked Norma. "It's just the way I work; it makes more sense if I look at something when I'm trying to figure out what is going on."

Norma said a few words and the prosecuting attorney said, "Sure, no problem. I'll have them copied for you and send them to your attorney."

"Is that it?" he asked, surprised at how little time the interview had taken.

"That's it," the prosecutor said. "Now we'll go over and get you booked in and get an arraignment set up."

As they escorted him from the interview room, they almost literally ran into David Rossi and his keepers. Rossi was – as only he could – strolling along as though he were royalty and his custodians were courtiers. He actually smiled and waved and said, "Good to see you, Morgan."

Derek just looked at him.

_Rossi is just Rossi_, he told himself. _Don't take it so seriously_.

**10:16 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

They made their way across the late-autumn landscape, two slim figures dressed in tans and taupes, fate and natural color preferences having prepared them perfectly to blend in with their surroundings.

"I get the feeling we're not headed for the parking area," Reid observed.

"I'm going around the long way," Strauss said. "If they don't know I'm here yet, they may not be watching my car."

"Except that, like me, you'll show on security cams. In the end, all Nora's denial will do is get her in trouble for lying."

Erin's expression darkened. "We'll head out toward the road, then. I can't let Nora get in trouble. She's been too loyal for too long."

Reid hesitated, but his natural curiosity got the better of good sense and social graces. "When you told her that you didn't want to open the door because you were having 'one of _those_ problems,' I wonder what 'those' problems are."

"Honestly, Agent Reid! Have you no delicacy?"

Although he could see fairly clearly that his answer was just going to get him in deeper, he was by nature honest, so he said, "No. Why?"

Strauss made a little sound of impatience. "If you must know, hot flashes."

"Oh."

_Yup, probably shouldn't have asked that one._

"I thought it was maybe something like menstrual cramps or irritable bowel syndrome," he said, hoping to cover for himself.

Erin Strauss stopped dead in her tracks. "Tell me, Agent Reid: Is anyone actually surprised that you're single?"

Continuing down the corridors of blissful ignorance seemed to be his best move. "It's a given that BAU team members will have the highest incidence of failed relationships," he informed her. "The ludicrous hours, that job stressors, and for the partners, the perils of trying to carry on a so-called 'normal' relationship with someone adept at profiling–"

"I'll take that as a no," she said with a sigh.

"No," he confirmed helpfully.

As they turned a corner around a stand of ornamental shrubs, they saw a large group of people.

"Deflect and distract," he murmured as he picked up Erin Strauss's hand. They were far enough away from the main building that he doubted anyone not specifically looking for them would identify either of them, especially if engaged in a public display of affection. "I can't carry your books for you, but I can carry your computer case for you."

Thank you; it's getting heavy," she replied, and handed over the leatherette bag.

He slung it over his shoulder with his messenger bag. Noting a handful of people looking at them, he leaned over and pecked her on the cheek.

"You're going to have me blushing like a schoolgirl," Strauss said, and she was smiling.

"Great," he said. "That adds to our credibility."

"Put your ID badge away," she said suddenly, and moved to do the same thing. "And make sure your gun isn't showing."

"What's up?"

"Tourists!" she announced, and for an instant he thought she had said terrorists.

_Wow, that would complicate stuff ..._

"That's a tour group," she said, nodding to her left. "Think we can slip in among them and become credible tourists long enough to get to wherever their bus will take them next?"

Before he could tell her that, no, he didn't think there was a snowball's chance in hell, she had picked up their pace, dragging him along by the sleeve of his sweater. She waved at one particular middle-aged woman and called, "I thought we had lost you-all!"

**10:27 AM**

**Penelope Garcia**

At the rate they were going, the techs would be at her place for days. Penelope wondered whether she should offer to fix them lunch.

_Nah, I'm fresh out of rat poison ..._

They had even confiscated her cell phone, leaving her with a land line she maintained only for last ditch emergencies. Hell, she didn't think she had even given anyone the number for it in six or seven years, and she emphatically was not listed in the directories.

Which made it all the more interesting that as she thought that, her land line rang.

She barely remembered the sound of it.

She raised her eyebrows at the Ethics jerks currently untangling some of her wiring. They shrugged – what can you do with a land line? A land line with a freakin' rotary dial, at that? – so she picked it up and said, "Hello?"

"Are we overheard?" came the distinctive, unmistakable warm tones of Jennifer Jareau.

Oh, girlfriend, this had better not be a sympathy call, because I will fall apart ...

"No," she said. "How are you?"

"Could be better," JJ replied. "Listen, I'll be real quick, I need you to make out a list of everything you'll need to build your system back up. Whatever it is. Whatever it costs. In as much detail as you think we need. Will they let you go to lunch?"

Penelope's heart raced at the idea that she was not alone, that the team, and even former team members, were there for her. "I have some people here," she said, weighing her words carefully and making sure that the IA techies heard her. "I was thinking of going out to lunch, but I'll probably ask them to come along."

That hurt less than saying, _I don't think they'll trust me to go out and get a sandwich without screwing them over._

Especially since she could hardly wait to get someplace where she could screw them over.

"That isn't a bad thing," JJ said. "Take them out to DiDi DiPietro's. Put your list in your napkin when you're done with lunch. We'll get back to you. Now say something that sounds boring."

What?

"Um, I don't know," Garcia said, vamping while she worked out what was going on and tried to think of something believably boring. Who in the hell would call her on her land line?

Telemarketers.

"I don't support them anymore," she said. "I didn't like their stand on gun control, and frankly, some of their leadership are kind of iffy."

"Excellent," JJ giggled.

"Thank you for calling," Penelope said, starting to get into it, "but all my resources are currently going into the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'"

"And you're sure you won't come to our fund raising dinner?"

Garcia was fighting the urge to grin now. "I'm positive, honey. I don't care if the senator himself fixes dinner and sings karaoke, I'm not interested at this time."

"But you should see him do his Keith Urban imitation."

"Honey, I don't care if he does a Lady Gaga imitation, I'm not going."

"Thank you for your support," JJ said. "DiPi's, before one-thirty."

"And you can take me off your calling list," Garcia said.

"In your dreams, baby girl," JJ assured her. "You aren't alone in this."

"I know," she said, and she meant it.

When she hung up, one of the techs was looking at her oddly.

"Some stuff never ends," she said carelessly.

He nodded like, yeah, he understood, but his intensity made her nervous. She sat down with her daisy-head pencil and a journal and began listing electronics she would need.

That tech who had looked at her oddly inched closer to her.

She was trying to hold the journal so it wasn't obvious that she was hiding what she was doing. She smiled up at him and thought, _Go away, turkey_.

"Hey," he said to her, very softly, and he slipped her a flyer about a fund raiser that the Service members' Legal Defense Network was holding that evening to fight DADT.

She beamed, folded it into fourths, and tucked it into the journal. "Great," she said, "If I haven't been arrested."

She surveyed the techs and wondered which of them she should invite out to lunch.


	5. A Wasteful and Ridiculous Excess

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

Author's note: Please see my profile for brief explanation of what has been happening on the personal front with my dropping out of sight, more or less.

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback lights up my life and is better than chocolate!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Five**

**A Wasteful and Ridiculous Excess**

**Emily Prentiss**

**11:34 AM**

Before she could manage to scare up a criminal lawyer of her own, Sarah appeared, a plump and rumpled woman apparently sent by Aaron Hotchner's attorney. She had the sharpest mind Emily had ever seen outside of the BAU. Within ten minutes, suffused with new confidence, she was more than ready to meet with her interviewer again.

"First off," she said to Agent Eddowes, the guy with the Duquesne University ring, "you seem to misunderstand the BAU's charter. We don't actually chase criminals, sir, at least not in the usual sense. We weren't called to New Orleans to break up a pedo ring. That was the job of the locals, not ours at all.

"We were called in because two small children disappeared – a boy and girl, four-year-old fraternal twins – and the local agencies who were trying to find them wanted our input on how the UNSUBs would present within the community. Once the children were located and rescued successfully, once our part of the paperwork was in order to prosecute the kidnappers and murderers who happened to be supplying to this pedo ring, our job was over."

"So you deny any interest in pedophiles in the Baton Rouge area?"

"I don't get it," she said, making the briefest of stabs at keeping her tone mild and non-confrontational. "You're obviously old enough to have completed law school and landed a job. You're either smart enough to get into Duquesne Law, or you know someone who is – or was – and lent you their ring."

"Ms Prentiss, Emily," Sarah said warningly.

"How can you be that smart and not know that any time you have two large cities close to one another you're gonna get blurred boundaries?"

Any attempt at non-confrontation was long gone now. She had been delighted when the BAU's leaders had allowed her to play the Bad Cop in interrogations. It was her natural orientation. The other agencies and departments that had cast her as Good Cop because of her gender had lost out on a genuine force of nature.

"People move back and forth, fella," she all but snarled now. "Businesses expand. Crime expands. Spill pepper in the French Quarter and somebody in Baton Rouge is gonna sneeze. San Francisco-Oakland, same deal. Tampa-St. Pete. Minneapolis-St. Paul. Sea-Tac. Dallas-Fort Worth. KC-K and KC-Mo. Hell, Baltimore and DC. Why–"

"Emily." Sarah's tone was sharper this time.

On the other hand, Emily also knew when it was wise to power down. She sat back and flashed a quick and meaningless smile at her interrogator.

He shoved some papers toward her. "What about this report you filed?"

She resisted saying _Do you have any idea how many reports I file?_ Instead, she glanced down at the top sheets.

The first two sets of clipped pages she recognized as raw interview data that she herself had written. She recognized the names and the situations. The third set started correctly, looking like something she might have filed and sharing a lot of details with the previous two documents, but it quickly turned into a list of members of several rings of pedophiles in the Gulf region.

"Tuesday Night Tasmanian Tusslers?" she read. "Not mine. Not ours, even. We looked at members of what might have been one large group or two smaller groups with a lot of overlap. One of them had no name that we could identify. The other one was a one-name made-up word, something you won't find accidentally on Google."

She skimmed down the list of names. "I don't – wait, I interviewed a Demarest, but I don't remember the first name. This might – no, never mind," she said, noticing the date of birth. "My Demarest was old enough to be this guy's grandfather. And he wasn't a college student. No, sorry. I don't know any of these names and I never filed this report."

"It certainly looks like your signature."

She glanced at the interrogator. "It sure does. That's really creepy. But good forgers and people skilled with drafting programs can do wonders faking handwriting. Sorry, sir, but this is not mine. We didn't do any investigations on anything like this. All of our energy and resources were focused on finding the people who had these children.

"Something else that's creepy," she said, keeping her eyes away from Sarah's face and her voice pitched in the same general register, "is those pictures of me at the ATMs. Too bad you don't have the original video so we could analyze it for digital manipulation."

The interrogator folded his hands in restrained glee. "We do have the video," he said. "I'm sure we can arrange to allow your counsel–"

"Thank you," Sarah said with a hint of defeat in her voice. "I'll let you know when I've contracted with a digital specialist."

"Very well," the interrogator said.

Emily kept her head down, the perfect picture of a woman who had just suffered a grave setback and was trying to keep her face up. She was a profiler and the daughter of an international diplomat. It did not occur to her for even a split second to flash a grin of triumph at her attorney.

**Aaron Hotchner **

**11:52 AM**

He stood among five other men, all of them dark-haired and slender. Two of them were clerical types; the other three were lawyers and investigators. None of them seemed inclined to be chatty. He was, he noticed, the only one among them wearing a tie. He removed his own and shoved it into his pocket as the guys who were running the lineup barked last minute directions at him and his potential "others."

He had to admit, they had done a good job selecting the other men. He had seen lineups that were nightmares of injustice, for instance a young, thin, black alleged perpetrator lined up with four chubby Hispanics and an elderly man with rounded shoulders.

He took his place in line – he was Number Four – and mounted the three small steps to the brightly-lit stage with its standard height markers. The lights were more intense and unpleasant than he had expected them to be. He blinked and tried not to frown or glare. There was no sense in looking more angry or threatening than he usually did, after all.

On command, he stepped forward, turned, stepped back. He was not asked to say any words. He couldn't figure out whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. He was doing such a splendid job of camouflaging his outrage and embarrassment at being treated like a criminal that he almost fooled himself.

The lineup was over in a matter of a couple minutes, which generally did not bode well. Chances were good that someone had just confidently identified him or one of his lineup mates quickly and without hesitation. His money was on himself as the identified person.

When they were led back into the anteroom, the other five men left as silently as they had arrived. Aaron returned with his escort to the lawyers' meeting rooms.

"Not good," Jamie told him in a low, sad voice. "Solid ID, no doubt in his mind."

"Not surprising, though," Aaron said. "After all, I _was_ in Baton Rouge."

"And they claim to have your fingerprints on some of the documents in question."

That one stopped him dead. "What?" he said, automatically, although he had heard his lawyer perfectly well.

Jamie paged through his papers. "Your fingerprints have been identified on, hang on, five of the documents in question. Have they fingerprinted you, Aaron?"

"Didn't need to. They're on file with the Bureau. Everyone's prints are, for purposes of elimination." Other reasons, too, but easy elimination from crime scene evidence was the most critical for them on a regular basis.

"Jesus," Jamie said. "Looks like someone's really out to get you."

Unspoken, not visible even in his eyes, but Aaron knew as an attorney himself that it was there, his Alabama-born and reared lawyer was internally finishing that statement: ... _or as guilty as a pie pan full of homemade sin_.

Hotchner was neither naïve nor the sort who prefers to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses. He had witnessed some terrible, terrible miscarriages of justice. He knew that the system was not perfect. It could be gamed and it could be purchased. One dishonorable man could bring the system down for a time – but only for a time. In spite of his lack of naïvete, Aaron preferred to place his trust in the system, imperfect as it could be.

If he stopped believing in the system, he might as well quit the Bureau – quit the practice of law altogether – and, well, teach history. Unless his disillusionment had disqualified him from doing that, too. Backup plans included industrial negotiations, private security, or maybe coaching a little baseball.

Or running away to join the circus.

Which, frankly, couldn't be all _that_ damned different from running the BAU.

**David Rossi**

**12:23 PM**

"I keep coming back to the money," he told his lawyer. They sat in an eight-by-twelve room with a scarred conference table and nine sturdy old oaken chairs with slatted backs and worn arms. "Think about it, Donnie. Two hundred thousand for me, three for Aaron, one each for Reid, Prentiss, and Morgan – that's eight hundred thousand dollars right there, and you know that the kind of organization that can pull something like this off has some deep pockets, Donnie. With all the evidence rigging they're doing, we're looking at probably twice that, say, two million dollars laid out – and for what?

"All I can figure is that it's to discredit the BAU, but again – why? We don't do much with organized crime, and they're the only people I can think of offhand who have that kind of resources. It isn't that hard to cast doubt on our results via legal methods. I've seen it done. We've all seen it done. But this is – weirdly personal. Like someone is gunning for Hotch and me, and is willing to pay out big bucks to do it, even bringing down the rest of the team."

Donnie gave a sympathetic sigh and continued to page through the documents he was slowly accumulating.

Rossi tried to close his eyes, but every time he did, he saw the storm clouds that had settled in over Derek Morgan's brow when they had passed in the corridor. Morgan didn't deserve this kind of grief. Hell, none of them did – although David Rossi was a celebrity of sorts, a big enough name to make an inviting target. And part of Hotchner's job as unit chief was to serve as their lightning rod.

So, OK. It was acceptable for him and for Aaron to be in the cross hairs. That was part of their job description.

But Morgan?

"Hey," a familiar voice, familiar even in its end-of-the-case weariness, said. He looked up with relief to see Aaron Hotchner and a man with tight gray curls, evidently his attorney, enter the room accompanied by a bailiff. "How are you doing, Dave?"

Rossi wondered how much or how little it was appropriate to say while the bailiff was still standing there. "I'm OK," he said. "I saw Morgan on my way to booking."

Hotch had worn no tie when he entered the room. Now he produced one from his coat pocket, fastened his top shirt button, and slipped the tie around his neck. As he knotted it, he said. "Prentiss is here, too. Reid called me earlier; he said he had an emergency dental appointment." He made a vague, helpless gesture as though to say, _and God knows what will happen to him when he gets home. _

"Garcia isn't in custody, but they're confiscating all her electronics," he continued, and he nodded toward his lawyer. "Jamie sent someone over to make sure she knows where she stands legally."

Because that was what the Unit Chief did. He took care of everyone, in every way that he possibly could. It was part of the job, but Aaron Hotchner infused it with a passion that sometimes awed, sometimes amused, and sometimes baffled David Rossi.

And this was yet another reason why Rossi would not have taken the unit chief slot for triple his salary and all the glory and the naked girls he thought that he could handle: For every hour that Hotchner spent engaged in actual investigation, he spent another three ensuring that when they went after the UNSUB, their butts were covered from every conceivable legal angle.

And making nice – or tough, as needed – with various local law enforcement entities, making sure everybody's feathers got smoothed and no one made a move that would complicate a successful prosecution. Because at the end of the day, that was the whole point of the Justice Department – successful prosecutions.

And then he would go back to his office and submit reports that justified every move that they had made, every decision they had reached, and every damn dime that they had spent.

Whenever David Rossi began to feel that Aaron Hotchner was a smart, well-wrapped kind of guy, he reminded himself that he had actively sought out that godforsaken and glamorless job, that nightmare of bureaucracy with a side order of guilt and desperation.

"Eventually everything will get straightened out," Aaron said. He sounded confident, but that meant nothing. Aaron showed the world, and even his own team, precisely what he wanted to show them. It was a quality that Rossi had in abundance himself, one that he routinely observed in cops, lawyers, profilers, and victims of abuse, and Hotch had been all four.

"Yeah," he replied, "and you know what they say about the wheels of justice."

Hotch rolled his eyes. "Don't. Reid and his freaking eidetic memory straightened me out on that one."

"About the wheels of justice grinding slowly but–"

"Wheels don't grind," Aaron said. "Mills grind. That's actually a misquote of a little four-line poem by Longfellow. It's called _Retribution_. 'The mills of God grind slowly / Yet they grind exceeding small; / Though with patience He stands waiting / With exactness He grinds all.'"

"Aw. Jesus," Rossi sighed. "You got that from Reid? He did the same damn thing to me when I mentioned 'gilding the lily.'"

"Oh, right," said Hotch. "Haley nailed me on that one years ago. It's something like, 'gilding the _something_ and _something-ing_ the lily.'"

Hotchner's lawyer cleared his throat. "Almost," he said. Then, in the warm and rounded tones of an actor, he declaimed, "'To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily' … and it goes on for a bit, then it ends up, 'To seek the beauteous eye of heav'n to garnish / Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.'"

Hotchner's lawyer gave a quick and self-conscious smile. "Shakespeare. _King John_. Undergrad drama club," he added.

The bailiff beat a hasty retreat.

**Penelope Garcia**

**12:37 PM**

The man at her front door was short in stature and broad in the shoulders. His hair was thinning and his smile was warm. He presented his business card – he was a lawyer – asked her to call him Marvin, and informed her that he had been sent by Aaron Hotchner to ensure that she had legal representation.

"How's everyone else?" she asked him quietly, not wanting her uninvited guests to hear either the question or the answer.

"They're doing all right," he assured her in a calm voice. "Agents Prentiss and Morgan are being released on bond this afternoon. Agents Hotchner and Rossi have been told that they won't be arraigned until tomorrow."

She ushered him in almost secretively, as though the agents would haul her away if they learned that she had lawyered up.

"They'll spend the night in jail?" she whispered, appalled. And yet, a tiny part of her, one she was embarrassed to acknowledge, was thinking, _well, better them than Derek_.

Marvin shrugged. "It's a possibility. That's what they're telling them, anyway. From what I hear, they don't have any firm reason for postponing the arraignment. It may be a completely empty threat."

Garcia clasped her hands together at her waist. "What can I do to help them?"

Marvin patted her arm. He smelled of musky aftershave and clove candies. "You can take care of yourself, Agent Garcia. Hotchner and Rossi can manage their own situation better if they're not worried about you and your teammates."

"What about Reid?" she asked. "Spencer Reid?"

Marvin's brow furrowed. "The PhD? No idea," he said. "He's one of the named parties on the indictment, but I don't believe he's in custody."

She tried and failed to picture Spencer Reid as a fugitive, on the run from the FBI.

He would last maybe ten minutes; he did not have a gift for dissembling. To the best of her knowledge, he couldn't lie to save his life.

"I need to go out to lunch," she told her new legal representative. "I will have chaperones with me, apparently."

"Then you'll have me, too," Marvin said. "I can protect you from your chaperones."

She wondered how much to tell him about her contact with JJ Jareau. About the handwritten list of electronics that currently was burning a hole in the pocket of her skirt, the list she was supposed to hand off in clear view of her keepers.

While she knew something of attorney-client privilege, her knowledge of it was neither as broad nor as confident as that of the other team members. During her own most intimate confrontation with the legal system, eight years ago when the Bureau had essentially told her, you work for us or you rot in jail, her representative had kept saying, "Don't tell me; I don't want to know."

Of course, part of that was because in that immediately post-9/11 atmosphere, anything and everything could have been called terrorism and all bets would be off.

But for all she knew that was still the case.

She smiled gratefully at Marvin and said, "Thank you."

And nothing else.


	6. Backspace: People on the Bus ReidErin

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

Author's note: Because I forgot to include it in the previous chapter!

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback lights up my life and is better than chocolate-covered strawberries!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Six**

**Brief Backspace: The People on the Bus Go Up and Down**

**10:33 AM **

**Spencer Reid**

Erin Strauss in her element, Schmooze Patrol, was a sight to behold. When confronted with the fact that neither she not Spencer had an official tour lanyard and ID, she blew an errant lock of hair, one that had escaped her maximum-security coiffure during their cafeteria escape, off her forehead and sighed.

"Well," she said, "my boyf–" She paused. Swallowed. "My boyhood friend, my nephew, here, and I seem to have lost our little thingies. You're not going to charge us again, are you?"

The tour guide, a young woman of college age, derived her courage from the rules. "So sorry," she told Strauss. "You can purchase another pass now, just covering the last third of the tour, that'll be fifty-one-fifty for the two of you–"

"Fifty-two-fifty," Spencer corrected her, ignoring both her surprise and Erin's exasperation. "What? I'm just saying–"

"Fine," Erin said from between clenched teeth. "I'll straighten this out with the management when we return." She dug in her bag and produced three twenties. "I'm sure your supervisor can make change if you don't carry cash."

"That'll be good," the tour guide chirped, snapping off a fresh pair of tourist ID badges and affixing them to thin plastic lanyards. She scribbled a hasty receipt and stowed the bills in her pocket. "I'll be happy to vouch for you."

"Your boyhood friend?" Spencer whispered to her as they took their seats. "You're transsexual?"

She made an impatient gesture. "Probably unnecessary frippery, but I wanted to keep the whole, um, underaged boyfriend thing going. It offered her several explanations for why we went off alone, and why we had, um, removed anything. And you started it, anyway," she finished.

"Underaged?"

Another gesture, more imperious than its predecessor. "You know what I mean, Reid. Too young for this cougar-wannabe."

She popped out of her seat. "Know what we found out?" she inquired of the people around her. Nobody seemed particularly interested until she mentioned some famous movie moments that were – and were not – filmed on the grounds of Quantico, and soon had most of the bus attending to her airy FBI-meets-Hollywood anecdotes. Even their guide seemed fascinated; Reid twice saw her making notes for future tours.

"I had hoped to catch a glimpse of David Rossi," Erin continued chattily. "The author, you know? I had dinner with him a few years ago when I was assistant manager of a Barnes and Noble where he came to speak. So debonair! Such a dynamic speaker! And the stories he tells in person, the ones that aren't in his books, are even creepier than the ones he writes about.

"The Behavioral Sciences department? The one he worked for? They've renamed it, it's the BUA, BSA, something like that, and they've called him back as a senior profiler-thingy, but they won't let him run the unit. The team, sort of. They appointed some, oh, lawyer or accountant or maybe both for all I know, to call the shots. And isn't that just like a bureaucracy? The Peter Principle in action?"

Reid wondered why everyone had presumed that Erin Strauss could never be an agent. She had the charisma to hold an audience, and she was proving before his eyes that she could easily go undercover, at least as a hero-worshiping cougar.

When the bus whipped onto the Beltway, she sat down.

"Where on earth did you pick up all that movie information?" he whispered.

"IMDb, mostly," she whispered back. "Years ago. I looked the place up when I first started here. Some stuff you just don't forget."

"Did you ever manage a Barnes and–"

"Of course not. Although I have certainly had dinner with David a few times."

Given Rossi's well-earned Lothario reputation, unwelcome visions filled Reid's head. "You didn't, you know, I mean, you two weren't–"

"Of course not. Don't be a twat."

He blinked at the unexpected vulgarity. He wanted to say _Glad to hear it_, but he felt she wouldn't take it well.

"Which part of the notion troubles you more?" she asked unexpectedly. "That it would be him, or that it would be me?"

Maybe he was picking up some people skills by osmosis, because he made a tiny shrug. "I don't want to think about David Rossi's pants," he lied effortlessly, "whether he's in them or out of them."

"Much better in them, my dear," Strauss said with a casual wave of her hand. "He's very much better in them. Especially now that he's developed a little belly on him." She met his surprised expression with an elegantly arched eyebrow. "My dear Doctor Reid, David has been to several barbecues at our house, and we hold them at poolside. Stop thinking dirty."


	7. Why It's Called Behavioral Analysis

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

Author's note: Please continue to see my profile for brief explanation of what has been happening on the personal front with my dropping out of sight, more or less.

I am committed to concentrating on finishing this story and writing nothing else

here on FFN (other than the occasional ficlet or challenge)

until it has been completed.

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback lights up my life and is better than chocolate!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Seven**

"**That's Why It's Called "Behavioral Analysis"**

**12:42 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

In yet another claustrophobic attorney-client cubicle in the Federal Building, Derek Morgan's pen froze over a three-by-five card his lawyer had given him.

"October fifth," he said, his voice low and his eyes focused somewhere other than the cubicle.

"Your rentals manager?" she prompted. "Derek, if you intend to use your properties to post your bond, you need this for the arraignment, and–" She consulted her wristwatch more as a visual aid than because she needed to know what time it was. "–and time's a-wasting if you want to get in and out before they break for lunch."

"October fifth," he repeated. "Norma, in that pic from October fifth, I was at the ATM wearing a suit and a tie. I wore that suit and tie on _Monday _night, on the _fourth_. My rentals guy, it was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party, gotta been fifty, sixty people there, and hundreds of pictures. And I'm wearing that suit in every damn one of them. And I made an ATM deposit on my way to the party."

Voice rising with excitement, he continued, "And then there's Shelly the Board Queen – she's a kid from the neighborhood, Rochelle Segretti, you don't see a lot of female skateboarders around there – when I was making that deposit at that ATM, Shelly cruised by and we talked a little, just, you know, teasing, and she had to remind me to get my receipt.

"I felt like an idiot at the time, like, _duh, taking your eyes off the ATM_, but if that bank video shows me turning to my, ah, it would have been my left, then the time stamp on that whole ATM thing has been altered."

"Derek? The arraignment? This is great information, lots to work with, but–" 

"No, ma'am. Screw the arraignment." He began scribbling phone numbers. "OK, here's Eric, he's my rentals guy. And Shelly lives—" He sighed and closed his eyes, mentally counting townhouse addresses. "At 1118, two blocks down from me. And she's a smart little cookie, aiming for GWU and she'll probably make it if she keeps on doing her homework."

"The arraignment."

Face grim and determined, he repeated, "No, ma'am. No, thank you. I want to be right here, in plain sight with no access to any telephones. Because on Tuesday, October _fifth_, I was with Ricardo Sanchez and Vic Ramey, my drywall guys – here, let me give you their contact info, and we were all over Gaithersburg picking up supplies for the next project. And let me write down the stores we visited – maybe there's still some security footage out there. And we did_ not_ stop at any banks. We did everything with my property account credit card."

"Credit card records," Norma said, her voice rising with an excitement to match his own. "And receipts. All date and time stamped."

"Exactly what I'm thinking."

As he flipped the card over to write more names, more places, more numbers, Norma leaned forward over the table, pumped, ready for the hunt. "And you want me to contact all these people?"

He sat back, closed his eyes, and thought about that. Finally he sighed and said, "No, Norma, I don't think so. See, part of my problem with all of this crap has been that the Bureau is not corrupt. If it were, I would have, you know, sussed it out a long time ago and moved on. Same with the regular DoJ suits. Even that asshole I was talking to in there. They're OK people; they just have to work with what they have. But what they have is bullshit."

Norma studied him for a long moment, then reached out and tapped the card with one long and elegantly tipped fingernail. _Pandas_, for God's sake. An icy tough lawyer with pandas cavorting on the acrylic tips of her fingers. "And you want me to take this back to Internal Affairs?"

He nodded. "And the DoJ prosecutors. And you need to do it in a way that it's crystal clear that neither you nor I had any chance to get to these people and jimmy an agreement out of them. I need to be right here, in plain sight, and if that means spending a night in the pokey, well, believe me, it'll be worth it."

"But you can still go to the arraignment. If we don't have everything out there with the prosecution by then you can always decline to post bail."

His mind raced for a moment. "That'll work."

**12:54 PM**

**David Rossi**

On the other side of the table, Hotch spoke into his attorney's cell phone, his voice calm and relaxed. "No," he was assuring his sister-in-law. "No, I'll be fine. This is a huge mistake, and it'll all be over soon. Yes, I promise I'll be home tomorrow." He laughed shortly. "Oh, trust me, Jess – nobody's going to be sending me out into the field at the moment. Not with this hanging over me. I'll be home all the time while this is going on. You and Jack will get sick of having me around. Yes. Yes, tell him I love him, too."

He closed off the call and returned the mobile to Jamie. "All set," he said, and his voice was very nearly as calm as it had been with Jessica. Only a little barely noticeable tension in his jaw and his fingers hinted at his unhappiness, and you had to be one hell of a profiler to see it.

Rossi wished that he felt as relaxed as Aaron did. He wished he could even _fake_ being as relaxed as Aaron was _pretending_ to be. There were all these little things, these little bits of pressure that the prosecution could legally apply. Like cuffs. They could walk into court free of restraints, or they could walk in in handcuffs, depending on how friendly the prosecutors felt toward them.

And after all the perps he had put away, the image he kept seeing was one of, oh, what's his name, whatever the hell Eminem's real name was. Skinny little blond kid in a nice blue suit and handcuffs at his arraignment, looking about as threatening as rice pudding. No idea why, out of all the crazies and the goombahs and the pure friggin' evil people he had shoveled into the justice system, that was the mental picture he kept calling up.

And then there was the other stick in the prosecution's carrot-and-stick repertoire.

_Jail._

Bastards had made it crystal clear that if they didn't start playing ball, they would spend the night in jail. Even knowing that it would be for no more than overnight, even knowing that both his lawyer and Aaron's were fighting this threat behind the scenes, on some levels he still felt ill with dread. Everyone in law enforcement knew what happened to law enforcement personnel dumb or guilty or unfortunate enough to wind up behind bars.

_And I'm too old to be much use in a fight. Damn, I hate to admit that._

For that matter, Aaron also wasn't getting any younger. And he wasn't particularly impressive with his fists, either. Never had been; it was probably his biggest shortcoming as an agent. _Unless you killed his wife_, Rossi reminded himself solemnly. That had generated so much passion and fury that it had more than compensated for lack of skill or finesse.

He suppressed a shudder. Maybe if you'd been through that, a visit to the prison showers didn't loom as potentially terrifying.

Finally he decided to speak up, just a little. "You're OK with jail?"

Hotchner made a dismissive noise. "Jail, my ass," he said. "They're limited in places they can put a nonviolent first-time Federal offender overnight, Dave. And the system here is _jammed_. Always is. I guarantee you, if we spend the night behind bars, it'll be in the holding cells a couple flights down. They're clean, they're well lit – no toilets, so you have to ask permission to go potty like a first-grader, and you buy your own meals from the vending machines down the hall – but it's only 'jail' in the sense that it has bars and you aren't going anywhere until they let you. It's nothing like pick-up-your-soap territory."

Rossi searched Aaron's features for evidence of deception and found nothing.

He looked first at Donnie, and then at Aaron's attorney. Both of them nodded agreement and encouragement.

He hadn't realized exactly how nervous he had been until the tension drained from his body.

_Yeah, OK. I can do that._

**1:02 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

There is a certain cachet, she decided, to having a Deputy Secretary of State post your bond for you. Ernesto was an old, old family friend, a man who had spoiled her silly when she was a child. A man who could be counted on not to blab to Ambassador Prentiss, currently posted to Greece, about her daughter's legal troubles.

"This is a travesty," he told her as they waited for his limo to collect them. "Shocking. Shame on whoever did this. When I think of all the unfortunates your agency has assisted, all of the wretched people of limited means who found justice through your efforts–"

She giggled [he had always had that effect on her] and nudged him. "Ernesto, Uncle, we'll also help the wealthy and powerful – we're not fussy. As long as, you know, they're pitiful enough."

He grinned. "You know that's not what I meant, Little Confection – I don't mean to paint the Bureau as Robin Hood–"

"L-O-L," she said, actually pronouncing the letters, _ell-oh-ell_. Five minutes with Ernesto, who seemed to live in front of his computer when he was not haunting Foggy Bottom receptions, and she was reduced to cyberspace acronyms. "Right, that's me. Maid Marian in Kevlar."

"But it is true that, on the rare occasions when I read or hear of your exploits, they tend to involve victims from the lower reaches of society."

_Arrggh_.

"What, you mean because so many serials target hookers?"

"You know what I mean–"

"What about the Chapmans? What about the Barringtons? General Wallingford's grandson? Talitha Sloan's parents?"

"Done, done, duly noted," Ernesto chuckled. "Fa-wiw–"

_Fa-wiw? What the fuck?_

_Got it. He's pronouncing FWIW, "for what it's worth."_

"I even know the Wallingfords rather well. They were enormously impressed with the work your bunch did. Too bad about that witness dying. I hope that won't mess up the case."

She sighed. "He was a great loss, and not just because he was a critical witness. He was an all-around good guy."

"Yes," Ernesto said sadly. "So was his wife. Very nice people. But back to Sherwood Forest, since Maid Marian was more consort than kickass, which of your coworkers, if any, has caught your eye? Is there a Robin Hood out there you have your eye on?"

_Crap. And if I don't name someone, he'll try to fix me up with someone. Or with several someones._

The limo glided to the curb and Ernesto gestured to the driver to stay put, opening the rear door himself for Emily. Once they were seated, he said, "Excuse me. You're going home, or to your attorney's office?"

"Home first," she replied. "No, let's hit a drive-through, any drive-through, and then home. If I'm not on the job, I might as well wear something that the Powers That Be might find a little inappropriate."

Ernesto gave the driver her address and directed him toward the nearest Burger King. "Go on, dear? On the romantic possibilities among your coworkers?"

"You're shameless, Uncle."

"I'm also curious."

She allowed herself to consider the current crop of BAU agents. "That's a tough one, Ernesto. I think intensity and a high degree of competence are really, really attractive, and everybody I work with, male, female, old, young, black, white, married and single, gay and straight and everything in-between, is both intense and incredibly competent. So they're all sexy as hell."

And were circumstances different, there wasn't a one of them that she would kick out of her bed, and she was pretty sure that many of her teammates felt the same way. But passion, both sexual and romantic, made a bad fit with the shared risks of the BAU. Of FBI field work, in general.

"So, nobody in particular."

"Sorry, Uncle Nessie. I'm seeing a couple people, as much as I can with my unpredictable and screwy schedule, but neither of them is Bureau. I tried dating this Organized Crime agent ..."

_Wait:_ "…_ so was his wife ..."?_

Trying to sound as casual as possible, Emily said, "I forget. What happened to, ah, Colonel Moyer's wife?"

"Very sad," her honorary uncle replied. "She recovered from the auto accident, but not from the loss of her husband. They had been married for almost forty years, you know, and, well – officially it was a stroke, but I think everyone knows it was grief."

_Oh, crap. Ohhhh, crapcrapcrapcrapcrap …_

She groped in one pocket for her phone and in the other for Sarah's office number. "Sorry, Ernesto, I have to make this call-"

**1:07 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

Still unsure why JJ had insisted that they eat lunch at DiDi DiPietro's, but up for anything that her favorite blonde suggested (in fact, hoping that the former BAU Media Liaison would show up herself), she followed her keepers and Marvin-the-legal-representative into the dimly lit old-style pizza parlor.

A tall and grouchy-looking girl in her late teens led them to a table, where she laid out their cutlery wrapped in cloth napkins. She presented the three men (Marvin, Rutherford, and the tech guy who'd given her the _Don't Ask, Don't Tell_ literature) with menus in a casual, almost slapdash manner, then plopped Penelope's down in front of her so carelessly that it fell on the floor.

"Sorry," she said in a voice untroubled by even a hint of apology. She stooped and picked up the colorful plastic-coated menu, holding it in both hands. "My bad. All on one check?"

_I remember now – somebody from work is related to DiDi, cousin or sib or niece or nephew or something. Would be nice if it were Reid, wouldn't it? Because I sure would like to hear from Genius Boy about now. But, no – all of his family is accounted for in Las Vegas._

_But maybe it's JJ herself. …_

"Separate checks," said everyone but Marvin, who gestured toward Penelope and said, "She's with me."

Garcia frowned at him, but didn't argue.

The waitress – her name badge said Krystal – said, "Whatever."

She thrust the last menu at Penelope, then produced an order pad. "Anything to drink?"

There was a small folded piece of paper tucked into the front plastic sheeting on her menu. Not daring to risk a glance at Krystal – or anyone else in the room – she slid it out and eased it into her right pocket without looking at it.

Her nervousness began to diminish, and she began to believe that, yes, as cinematic-intrigue as the idea was, there would really be someone there who would find the list she was to hide in her napkin at the close of the meal. And it likely was their sullen, careless server, Krystal.

_Italian cuisine – maybe Rossi's family? No, they're all from Long Island._

_Hotchner's from Virginia and his brother's a chef – but DiDi's has been here for fifty years. Sean's barely thirty._

_Derek's from Chicago, Emily's from everywhere but here, JJ's from Western Pennsylvania._

She gave up.

_Must be someone on the second team. But who would do this? And whom would JJ trust with something this dangerous?_

**1:22 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

His lawyer, Jamie, had managed to rustle up four cold cans of soda from a vending machine. This was a good thing, because DoJ coffee was generally only a cat's whisker better-tasting than cop shop coffee, which was pretty universally disgusting.

"They claim to have my fingerprints," Rossi said mournfully as he reached for a Diet Sprite. "Did I already tell you that?"

Hotch popped the tab on a Dr. Pepper. "No, but I'm not surprised. They found mine, too."

"Did the documents look familiar to you?"

"Not in the slightest. None of them did."

"Ya gotta wonder how they pulled that one–" Rossi began to say, then turned abruptly to his own lawyer, who was pouring his diet ginger ale into a paper coffee cup. "Donnie, do you happen to know whether any of the other team members' prints showed up?"

Donnie nodded. "I do know. They didn't show up. Just the two of you, the ones who were in Baton Rouge."

"Yeah," Rossi said. "Yeah, that fits." He stared at nothing, something beyond the table but before the floor, and Hotchner felt a tiny tingle of hope. He knew that look, the way that his colleague had of gnawing on the far right corner of his lip. Knew the signs that David Rossi thought he had found a couple puzzle pieces that went together.

He waited silently, unwilling to do or say anything that might interrupt the flow of logic and intuition.

"Hey, Aaron," Dave said at last.

He kept his tone and manner rigorously free from evidence of excitement. "Mm?"

"Remember that woman with the cappuccino and all of those papers–"

"–in the elevator," they finished together, voices equally flat, and their eyes met.

"So they were already setting this up," Rossi added. His tone was subdued, but there was a glint of something in his eye, that spark that shouted _new information, new direction_.

"They were. And we know what one of them looks like."

Jamie carefully wiped condensation from his Coke. "Don't suppose one of you would like to clue in your defense team, would you?"

Aaron looked across the table. Rossi was not the type who felt comfortable speculating in front of witnesses. In front of Aaron, even Morgan and Prentiss, he could bounce his ideas around. For anyone else, Rossi preferred to maintain silence until he was beyond speculation and into reasoning.

"Sure," David replied finally. "In the elevator on our way to see the local prosecution team in Baton Rouge, we shared an elevator with – two? Was it two men? White? Middle-age?"

"Two," Hotch confirmed. "One of them bald. And a young woman with a giant cappuccino and a double armload of papers–"

"And she spilled her coffee and half the papers went blooey, all over the floor of the elevator," Rossi continued, "and Hotch and I and the other guys helped her pick them up."

He paused as though something else occurred to him as he spoke. "And some of the papers were blank. I kind of looked at her funny when I handed them to her–"

Hotchner took up the story seamlessly. "I noticed that, too, but she had a torn package of, um, Office Max brand all-purpose paper, and you know how easily the stuff slides out when there's a lengthwise tear as well as an opening at one end."

David regarded him with surprise. "You remember that it was _Office Max_? When did you become Spencer Reid?"

"Same brand we used," Aaron explained. "Same package that Haley and I used at home. And something else that makes me think that the two other men were part of it. We were handing the papers we picked up directly to her but the other two men kept their papers separate."

"Ohh, man," Rossi sighed. "This is frickin' _huge_."

**1:56 PM**

**Spencer Reid**

He fidgeted in his molded plastic seat at the Wendy's three blocks from DiDi DiPietro's pizza parlor. He felt helpless, felt as though he should be doing something more constructive than shredding one sugar packet after another and pouring their contents into his coffee while Erin Strauss picked at her salad and gazed out of the window.

He was about to confide this when suddenly Strauss perked up. Her posture became more erect, and that incandescently brutal, "_I'm about to nail someone's hide, preferably Rossi's or Hotchner's, to the wall,"_ gleam was in her eye.

Her eye, however, was on a tall and sullen-looking young woman in jeans and hoodie who had just entered the restaurant. The girl, who looked barely out of high school, was heavy-set, but she did not wear her weight as gracefully and naturally as Garcia did, which made her look all the more awkward.

When she walked away from the counter, she carried a large Frosty and fries.

"That crap isn't good for either your waistline or your complexion," Strauss said to the girl.

"Tough," the young woman responded without anger. "Like you should talk, bossy old thing."

"Give me those fries," Strauss continued.

The girl sighed and rolled her eyes elaborately. "God, you're such a bitch!" but she handed over the small cardboard container.

"Thank you," Erin breathed, unexpected passion in her voice. "Thank you so very, very much."

"Yeah," the girl whispered back. "You owe me _soooo_ big-time. Like, I'm use the car tonight."

"Take it," Erin said. "The van is – unavailable at the moment, so it'll have to be the Lexus."

"For real?" All sullenness had vanished.

"For real. Keys are in the far left kitchen drawer. And, Krystal?"

"Yeah?"

"It had better return with a full tank."

"Promise!" The girl dropped a quick kiss on Erin's forehead and vanished through the door and out into the street with a caroled, "Thanks, Mom!"

Once she was gone, Erin reached in among the fries and produced a piece of folded violet notepaper with Penelope Garcia's familiar angular script in flaming scarlet ink.

She beamed across the table at Spencer. "Let's go."


	8. Three Things Not Going Well

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

Author's note: Please continue to see my profile for brief explanation of what has been happening on the personal front with my dropping out of sight, more or less.

I am committed to concentrating on finishing this story and writing nothing else

here on FFN (other than the occasional ficlet or challenge)

until it has been completed.

Sorry for delay on this – got myself tangled up with those Valentine's and New Year's challenge fics, and even on my best days I'm not known for mad organizational skillz.

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories. Your feedback lights up my life and is better than dark Madagascar chocolate with raspberries!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Eight**

**Three Things Not Going Well**

**1:36 PM**

**David Rossi**

He picked without enthusiasm at a takeout chef salad that Donnie had brought back for him and drank another can of pop. He understood that the conference room that they currently occupied, with random officials and clients shuffling in and out, was a holding area, and not a place where he might claim attorney-client privilege, yet he burst with questions.

It would have been so much easier if they had summoned _him_ to another round of questioning. He was a goddamn _interrogator_. But, no, they took the freaking _lawyer_. They took Aaron, whom he could have trusted to silence him with a glance if he said anything that he shouldn't.

It wasn't that he didn't trust Donnie to know the law; it was that he wouldn't have to explain anything to Hotch about the BAU and its workings – and about its own special potential legal complications. That was one of his fields of expertise.

He wiped his hands on his napkin and glanced around. At the moment, they were alone. "Listen," he said to Donnie, "don't try to explain the ins and outs of discovery law to me, OK? Aaron has been trying for years, and – it's a closed book to me. It always will be. All I need is a simple yes-or-no answer. Can we get hold of that fingerprint report?"

Donnie tapped his attache case. "I have a summary right here."

"A summary?"

"Yes."

_Damn these lawyers, can't answer a simple yes-or-no question without a string of qualifiers!_ "So that's a 'yes,' Donnie?" he asked cautiously.

His attorney sighed. "That's a limited 'yes.'"

Well, that was better than nothing.

"Did it specify whether the printing on the pages overlaid the fingerprints, or whether the fingerprints were on top of the printing? What I mean is–"

"I see where you're going," Donnie assured him. "Were the documents printed out before you touched them, or after? Or both?"

"Exactly."

Donnie consulted his paperwork. "It doesn't specify," he said. His brow furrowed as he continued to page through documents. "No mention anywhere."

_Arrgggh._

His natural inclination was to nod authoritatively toward some colleague and say, "Let's get that done."

But he was the freaking _bad_ guy, the _potential UNSUB_, here. He had no access to colleagues, let alone to the Bureau's laboratories. Those resources were arrayed against him, not for him.

"So how do we do that?" he asked. "Can we get custody of the documents and have a private lab do our own analysis?"

"May be simpler than that," Donnie assured him. "We can hire our own experts to analyze the raw data from their investigation. It's possible that we won't have to move to get hold of the evidence ourselves."

_So this is how the Little Guy feels,_ Rossi realized suddenly. _Helpless. Up against a massive bureaucracy. And if I didn't have outside income, I'd be in a panic by now, wondering how in the hell I was going to pay for all those experts._

"Because that's critical," Rossi continued, mainly to reassure himself. To focus his mental energies on the problem, and not his situation. "If all of our fingerprints are underneath the text, then there's nothing to prove we had anything at all to do with the content."

"I understand," Donnie said. He had opened his laptop and now he flexed his fingers over the keyboard. "I hear what you're saying, and I'm on it. Writing it up right now."

"Good." Rossi was trying to squeeze a little more bleu cheese dressing out of one of the little plastic packets when two uniformed officers with stony faces appeared at the door to the conference room.

"Rossi?" one of them said.

"Present and accounted for," he said, continuing to coax dressing onto his salad.

The one who had spoken stepped forward and slapped some papers down in front of Donnie, who frowned and said, "This is unnecessary, gentlemen. I have a petition before the court–"

Handcuffs appeared.

Rossi was suddenly confident that he was not being taken to an arraignment. "Holding cells?" he asked, looking at his lawyer. Donnie nodded, but he still looked angry.

"It's all right," Rossi assured him, hoping that the holding cells were as bland as Hotchner had described them. "Do what you have to do. That thing you're working on there – that's more important than this."

_Someday,_ he told himself as they snapped the cuffs on his wrists, _somebody is going to pay for this, big time. And I want to be there to watch._

The second officer gathered up Dave's coat, his salad, his napkin and his can of soda and thrust them into his hands. "Let's go," he said.

**2:20 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

He and his lawyer still sat in the small room where they had met with the prosecutors, giving them Derek's insights into the bank evidence from October.

"It's going well, I think," Norma said. "I thought you made a mistake asking to have the arraignment postponed, but it's working in your favor now."

"Seems to be," he replied. "Like I said, most of these DoJ people are solid folks, the kind who follow the truth wherever it takes them. Phillips seems like an all right knd of guy, and, man, that Chen girl, she rocks. Sharp as she can be."

"Both of them were certainly responsive," Norma agreed.

_Responsive_ was hardly the word. As soon as Morgan started naming names and giving dates, the two deputy prosecutors had taken detailed notes and right in front of Morgan and his attorney had begun to line out a plan of action.

There was a light tap and a new face, young, black, earnest, yet another of the overworked and underpaid minions of the Department of Justice, appeared in the doorway. "Morgan?" he said.

Derek acknowledged his identity.

"Clement Stark, DoJ," the new face said. "I have a few questions."

"Join the parade," Morgan sighed and gestured toward the seat across the table. "What do you want to know?"

Stark entered the room with a tray, a large pitcher of water, and three glasses. He set the tray down on the table, gestured for them to help themselves, engaged the recorder and produced a Miranda card.

"You know," Derek said," you really don't need to do my rights again. I already–"

"Proceed," Norma said, smoothly overriding him.

He listened, he answered, he signed and initialed again.

Stark ran him through some of the preliminaries again, name, age, residence, employment history, then smiled toothily. "I understand that you have a substantial history of undercover work."

"Some," Morgan said. "A couple years, on and off. Nothing since 1999. And I wouldn't call it substantial. Intense, a few times, but not substantial."

"And how much of this involved narcotics?"

Derek narrowed his eyes. "None of it."

Stark seemed incredulous. "None of it?"

"OK, look, if you want to look at it that way, all of it. Because no matter where you go, there will be drugs. I worked gangs, counter-terrorism, organized crime, and on loan to the BATF. None of the investigations I worked on centered on drugs. But there are always drugs there in the background out there, either as a cash source or because one or more subjects have a drug problem."

"Mr. Stark, where is this line of inquiry going?" Norma asked, her tone sharp.

"Just establishing background," Stark said smoothly. "Mr. Morgan, what portion of your undercover work was here in the District?"

"None of it. I have never worked undercover for the Bureau. That was all through Chicago, and later SPOD, the Illinois State Police SBI. I went on loan to, ah, California and Missouri. Nothing here."

"And how well do you know the Hunnicutt Projects?"

"Pardon me?" Morgan was now completely confused. "What, in DC? I just know what I read in the papers, see on TV. Supposed to be crack house heaven down there. But I have never – repeat, never – worked narcotics straight-up, and never done any undercover work here. So I literally just know what the average guy on the street knows off TV and the internet."

"Yes, let's talk about the street," Stark said, and his smile signaled danger. "How many of your current friends and associates are familiafr with the street?"

"Let's close this down," Norma said, rising to her feet.

Derek opened his mouth to argue with her, but – she was the lawyer.

"I'm saying nothing else on advice of counsel," he told Stark.

"Fine," Stark said. He glared at Morgan, "You are not excused," he said, "and you are not to leave this room."

He rose from his seat with dignity and stalked out, closing the door behind him with a faint snick.

"Weird," Morgan said.

"What on earth are they driving at?" his lawyer said, more to herself than to him.

"I don't know," he said, "but I do know that this whole damn thing was a setup. This is where he wants me – stuck in a little room with a great big pitcher, nervous and dry at the mouth and gulping one glass of water after another. Nothing like a little pressure on the bladder to loosen tongues.

"Man," he added, his tone reflecting profound annoyance, "I can't believe he thought I was so lame I wouldn't see this coming."

**2:24 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

Something had changed, changed very much for the worse.

He could see it in the posture of his two interrogators as they reentered the room. Whatever they had been called out for, it was bad. And it wasn't a setup, either. They hadn't returned full of righteous anger, or any of the usual good-cop, bad-cop energy.

They looked – off-balance.

Nevertheless, the looks they threw his way were not friendly.

He sighed.

He was a suit, and so they would get physical with him, because his lawyer was not currently in the room with him. They would get in his face, scream and threaten, insult him, because that was the kind of thing that intimidated suits.

So his only question was, act like himself, or act like a suit?

Too soon to answer on that one.

A third man entered the room. Big. Old. Angry. Doing a pretty good job of faking the whole _I'm-so-crazy-you-can't-trust-me-to-be-professional_ vibe.

_No, wait: Some of that isn't faking. This guy is either the best that I've ever seen or he's genuinely upset._

So Hotch started talking, his voice low, calm, reassuring. "I don't know what's happened," he told the man, "but it's obviously a game-changer for you. How can I help? What do you want from me?"

Big guy – his ID said Wozniak – produced a pair of handcuffs from his pocket.

His eyes were dead.

_Christ, whatever this is, it's real, and it's really, really bad._

There was no bolt on the table, but he found one on the chair, directly under the seat. Hotch scootched back a little and opened his legs. Wozniak didn't acknowledge his cooperation. He just clipped the cuffs to the bolt and fastened them to Aaron's wrists.

He tried to relax, tried not to anticipate where the attack would come from.

Instead, Wozniak shoved the table – which, unlike Hotchner's chair, was not bolted to the floor – to one side. Then he spun a chair around and mounted it backwards, arms crossed over the back.

"You told those other guys," Wozniak began, his voice as heavy and world-weary as any Hotch had ever heard, "that you take responsibility for the professional actions of your team."

"Yes," he replied.

"And you're sure about that? You still stand by that?"

Hotch met his eyes.

_Wondering, Christ, what the fuck has Spencer Reid done?_

"Absolutely," he said.

Wozniak slid his chair right up against Hotchner's knees, mounted it again, and leaned a little further forward, into what little personal space Aaron had left. "I want to believe you, Aaron. I've seen your record, and it's stellar. But you have to give me something to work with here.

So tell me: Does that include the murder of a federal prosecutor?"


	9. Lawyers, White Trash, and Garcia

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

Author's note: Please continue to see my profile for brief explanation of what has been happening on the personal front with my dropping out of sight, more or less.

I am committed to concentrating on finishing this story and writing nothing else

here on FFN (other than the occasional ficlet or challenge)

until it has been completed.

Sorry for delay on this – got myself tangled up with those Valentine's and New Year's challenge fics, and even on my best days I'm not known for mad organizational skillz.

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories.

You light up my crazy life!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Nine**

**Lawyers, White Trash, and Garcia**

**2:40 PM**

**Spencer Reid**

"This doesn't seem right," Reid fussed as they set up in a coffee shop with wi-fi. "I can't imagine how she can do the things she does using any old off-the-shelf computer."

"That's what she said," Erin said, walking the machine through its initial setup. "Start unpacking the disc burner; we'll need it in about five minutes. And you might consider changing your clothes."

Spencer glanced with distaste at the three large bags of random stuff they had purchased at the thrift store. "Now?"

"No, not now, but soon. OK, the USBs go in now."

"I don't even have all the plastic off this thing yet."

"Then get a move on, Reid." Strauss slipped her reading glasses on and scowled at the list that they had received from Garcia. "FTP-what?" she said. "Spencer? Can you read that?"

He studied it for a few seconds and began slowly to read the meaningless alphanumeric string back to the section chief. When he looked up, Erin had connected with a plain, ugly site that offered downloads of an unusual flavor of Linux, apparently called _Wasteless_. "I never heard of that one," he said. "Puppy and Ubuntu – I have a friend who uses those – but not this one."

"It's a fast download," Strauss said. "Will you for pity's sake get the USB connectors in?"

He gave up wrestling with the package and took his utility knife from his messenger bag. Two quick cuts, and the CD burner was free and plugged into the new laptop. "Why do we have to burn this anyway?"

"We need to load it off the CD when we replace the operating system," Strauss said. "How on earth did you get a doctorate in engineering without knowing this?"

"I'm not a computer engineer," he replied calmly. "I'm a mechanical engineer. And whatever math I can't do it my head, my slide rule and my scientific calculator will handle. Computers train us how not to think, not to remember, not to calculate, and not to reason."

"Yes, well …." Strauss's voice trailed off. "Now we burn this, then we rip Windows 7 off this machine and put this OS on. Once that's running, we get the specialized programs from her FTP."

"And that's where we need the math."

"Yes. That's where we'll need the math."

Reid's phone vibrated. He took it out and studied the faceplate. "That Eisenstein person again," he said with disgust. "This is his third call."

Erin Strauss opened another window in her browser. "What's his phone number?"

He read it off to her and she typed in some numbers. "Defense attorney," she said. "Very reputable firm. Maybe it's time to use one of the throwaways."

"What if it's really Internal Affairs?" Reid asked, his stomach twisting with suspicion.

"Not a chance, dear boy. If that's really E and IA you can confess that you're Jack the Ripper and Judas Iscariot and they won't be able to use a word of it in court. No, it's all about the prosecution, honey. Pretending to be your defense attorneys is way, way beyond the pale."

Reid thought about that and decided that Strauss was probably right. He pawed through their shopping bags for one of the four prepaid phones they had purchased and dialed the number.

"So glad to hear from you," a genial tenor voice said once he had identified himself. "I've been retained by Aaron Hotchner to help facilitate your, ah, surrender to the federal authorities, and I'm also tasked with serving your interests."

"By Aaron Hotchner?" Reid echoed.

"That's correct." 

"Then, can you tell me how the rest of the team is doing?"

"I surely can, young man. Agent Prentiss has been released on bond. Agent Morgan is awaiting his arraignment. Agents Rossi and Hotchner will be arraigned tomorrow; they're being transferred to holding cells for the night. Agent Garcia is free, but closely watched by agents of the Bureau. We've sent someone from our firm, a very competent young man, to see that her interests are served. And you, of course, are 'in the wind,' as they say. How did your dental appointment go?"

"Hey," Strauss said, nudging him. "The number of today, plus two thousand, reversed, cube root to at least twelve places."

"Just a moment, sir," Reid said. He muted his phone. "November fifteenth is three-nineteen." He tapped 9132 into his calculator. "Twenty-point nine oh two oh three eight oh six three five oh one," he read out.

Strauss entered numbers. "And now the cube root of nine oh two three oh oh."

Reid punched his keys. "Ninety-six point six three one one one three eight nine oh nine nine five."

The entire screen of the notebook computer lit up bright pink with the legend in dark purple, "You Are a Goddess!"

"But we already knew that," Erin said blithely.

Reid raised one eyebrow. Goddess of the Underworld, maybe. Now, who the hell was Pluto's consort?

_Ohhh, right …_

Persephone.

They made a tidy bracket, he decided. Penelope and Persephone.

Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Strauss glanced at him suspiciously. "What are you smiling about?"

"Mythological archetypes." He unmuted his phone. "Mr. Eisenstein? Thank you for waiting."

**2:44 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

When she was three minutes from home, her cell phone sounded. Caller ID informed her that it was Sarah, her attorney, finally returning her call.

"Prentiss," she said.

"Emily, are you at home?" the woman asked.

"Almost. We're about six blocks away."

"It might be better if you go somewhere else," Sarah said. "Things have been changing rather dramatically."

"I should hope so! Listen, I think I may have an idea about what this whole thing is about," Prentiss told her.

"Then you certainly should not go home."

Sarah's voice was so flat, so decisive, that Prentiss felt a little shiver. "Talk to me," she said.

"Apparently Agent Morgan discovered a potential discrepancy in the bank records," Sarah said. "He and his lawyer were persuasive enough that acting on their leads, a one of the deputy prosecutors, a thoroughly lovely young woman named Laurie Chen, was sent to double-check some data. They found her an hour later, dead in the heart of the Hunnicutt Projects."

"Hang on, Sarah – Uncle Nessie," Emily said to her host, "I don't think I'm ready to go home. Could I go hang out at your place for a while?"

"I'd be delighted," the elderly man said. "And the doggies will be ecstatic. Is something wrong?"

"I don't know," she replied. "I just have a lot to think about." She unmuted her phone. "Sarah? Was she robbed?"

"I believe that she was. I'm not sure it's significant. If whoever killed her didn't rob her, anyone else in the Projects could have helped himself or herself before the body was discovered. It would be a lot more significant if she hadn't been robbed."

"And … the reason I shouldn't go home?"

"Sweetheart, they're already trying to pin this on Morgan. Don't be easily available."

Prentiss turned in her seat and slammed her fist repeatedly against the padding on the door. "Goddammit!" she blazed. "They have my job, my reputation, my car, and now they have my freaking house. Are they at least done with the search warrant?"

"They want access to your safe."

_Oh, no. _

There were items, links to information, lurking in her safe that had the power literally to kill her.

"They can go fuck themselves."

"Agent Prentiss, dear, they can simply remove the safe and–"

"Oh, the hell they can!" She turned back to Ernesto, her face contorted with both anger and frustration. "Mister Deputy Secretary Cavallieri," she said in her most formal tones, "I'm all tangled up with my legal adviser at the moment. Get me Julian Birdwell at State – now! Like _hell_ they're getting into my safe."

**3:32 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

"Mrs. Garcia?" a high, unfamiliar female voice cawed, part white trash and part blackbird. The number on Caller ID meant nothing to her. "Brandy Mae, you know, from the Craigslist, you know?"

"It's _Ms_ Garcia," she corrected automatically. "Craigslist? I'm sorry, I don't believe that I–"

"You bought them scarves from me?" the voice prompted. "Them designer-look scarves, whole box, twenty dollars? Talked to my daughter Krystal? Over at DiDi's? The scarves?"

_OK. Krystal. DiPietro's._

She glanced around quickly. The two jerks from Ethics were taping up the last of the nine boxes of technical equipment and stored media they were confiscating from her apartment. Marvin the maybe-attorney slouched on her sofa, reading slowly through the search warrants and other documentation Garcia had been given and making voluminous notes.

Against her better judgment, Penelope said, "OK, what about them?" 

"Me and my kid, we're on your side of town, we can drop them off if you come to the curb. It's twenty dollars, like we agreed. And it's got to be cash."

All of Garcia's most paranoid nerve endings tingled. "I don't–" she began, Was this a trap? She was already sure that the team had been set up. Was this a new setup to make sure she went to jail, too? "I don't think I have twenty cash on me," she blurted. "I haven't been past the bank yet."

"Oh, hey," Rutherford from Ethic and Internal Affairs said, walking by her with a large box of electronics. "I can front you twenty."

"You don't need to–"

"Hell, honey, it's our fault you're caught short. It's no problem," he replied with a smile.

Well, if there was ever clear evidence that this was a setup, this was it. The guy who wanted to bust her offering to lend her the money? It was freaking entrapment, was what it was–

"Hurry up," the cranky voice said. "Time's a-wasteless."

_Yeah, right, it's– _

_Oh._

_Wasteless._

Her personal version of Linux.

"OK, sure," she stammered. "When will you be here?"

"About three minutes."

"I'll – uh – I'll be watching for you."

Unfortunately, so would Ethics and Internal Affairs.

"I have people here," Garcia said. "People from work, pretty high ranking people, so–"

"Oh, we won't get in the way of your snooty big shot friends," Brandy Mae assured her with a snort of laughter.

When she hung up, Rutherford produced two ten-dollar bills from his billfold. "Here you go, Ms Garcia – you can write me a check or just catch up with me next time you're down at Hoover ... "

She crossed to the window and gazed down into the street two floors below. After three or four minutes passed, a late model American sedan pulled over at the curb. Woman at the wheel, brightly colored scarf on her head, its contours indicating that she had her hair up in rollers. Garcia expected Krystal, but instead a young man emerged from the passenger side, basically a standard unemployed shit-kicker wearing torn jeans, filthy torn sweater, and work boots, with dark blue neckerchief bound, pirate-like, over dirty curls. He shifted a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and turned to talk to the driver.

But … the way he moved … those familiar slim hips … holy shit …

"Be right back," she told Rutherford boldly, "unless you want to come along and shake down these goobers I bought the scarves from."

"Nah, not necessary," he replied. "Goobers, huh? You get a good deal from them?"

She shrugged. "Pretty much. Vendor beware, ya know?"

He chuckled. "Oh, yeah."

She snagged her keys off the end table, stuck Rutherford's two ten-dollar bills in the pocket of her skirt, and trotted down the stairs.

"Hi," she called at her two visitors. The tall, gangly male produced a cardboard box from the back seat and tucked it under one arm. With the other arm, he reached back and scratched his butt.

_Yes, my God, it's our beloved Dr. Reid and he looks like a male crack whore, for shit's sake, but who's the woman?_

She took another look and slammed on her brakes, both physical and mental.

_Oh. My. God._

She turned away quickly, nervously, not wanting to give anything away.

Rutherford, God damn him, was right behind her, jogging to the curb with an affable smile on his too-intelligent face. _Not necessary, my ass._

"Aw, ain't that cute, Ricky Lee," the driver, good God, the driver of the sedan said in her high-pitched bar floozy croak, "her old man come down to carry her stuff for her."

So-called Ricky Lee snorted and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Hey, man," he said directly to Rutherford in low, confidential tones, "you lookin' for anything? Meth? Weed?" He wiped his nose again. "Blow job?"

Rutherford, obviously not prepared to identify himself as law enforcement, made a weird noise and backed off. "No, it's OK, man," he stammered. "I'm cool. You'll be OK, right, Ms Garcia?"

Penelope gazed with utter adoration at the pair at the curb. "I think so," she said to Agent Rutherford as he retreated for the apartment building. "I think I'll be just fine."


	10. One Lousy Surprise After Another

Usual boring disclaimers, not mine, yada yada

The **[backspaces]** in this chapter are because I got so jazzed writing Reid-and-Strauss undercover that I lost track of how much time was elapsing, so ... pay attention to the timestamps. The first two of the Emily scenes contained herein actually happen before

most of the sequences in the previous chapter.

Well, it was that or rewrite Nine and Ten.

Three more chapters and an Epilogue will complete this story.

Thank you to everyone who reads, favorites, alerts, or (especially) reviews these stories.

You light up my crazy life!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Ten**

**One Lousy Surprise After Another**

**[Backspace] **

**2:48 PM **

**Emily Prentiss**

"Go home first," Julian Birdwell told her, his voice heavy with authority. "I'll meet you there."

Emily frowned into Ernesto's mobile. "But my lawyer–"

"She's only a lawyer, Angel Dust. Trust your Uncle Julian."

_Uncle Julian. _

_Yeah, right._

Julian was several years her junior, another college wonder boy, a friend of Reid's who had carved out his improbable success story with the State Department – and the CIA, although few suspected it and even fewer knew it. On Reid's recommendation she had gone out with him several times. He was charming, well connected, and downright ornamental, but just a little too exotic for her.

Which was saying something, because her tastes were, well, _yeah_. Sometimes kind of out there.

"OK, fine," she said with a sigh. She closed off the call and returned Ernesto's phone to him. "We're going to my place after all," she told him. "At least for a few minutes." She looked at him apologetically – after all, he was a busy man, and he'd already taken two hours out to spring her from DoJ custody. Now she was asking him to chauffeur her all over the District.

Ernesto seemed unruffled. He leaned forward and instructed the driver that their destination had once again changed, then sat back with a smug look on his face. "So," he said, "you're seeing Julian Birdwell?"

_God, ever the little Italian yenta …_

"No, Uncle Ernesto. Well, yes. We've gone out a few times. But nothing serious."

"Pity. The boy is going places."

_Well, if I'd wanted that kind of life I'd have stayed with ... never mind._

She handed back Ernesto's mobile and reached for her own again, thumbing redial to connect once more with Sarah, her _I-can't-believe-I-need-a-criminal-attorney_ lawyer.

"He's tall enough for you," Ernesto told her as the phone rang.

_Who? Oh, right. Julian._

"He's just a friend," she assured him, and even as she said it she knew it was the wrong choice of words.

Not surprisingly, Ernesto shrugged off her protests. "And I think your mother is just a little bit afraid of him," he said.

_Oh, really?_

That was interesting. Promising, too. She would have to explore that notion.

But not now. "Hello? Sarah?" she said into the phone. "This is Emily Prentiss again."

~ o ~

**[Backspace]**

**3:01 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

She stood in the center of her living room, refusing either to sit down or to play nice. Ernesto, who had demonstrated no interest in deserting her side, leaned against an internal wall with his hands in his pockets and glared at the FBI agents gathered there.

All things considered, the search team from Ethics and Internal Affairs could have made a bigger mess than they had while searching her apartment. The fact that they hadn't, however, failed to make her feel any friendlier toward them.

"No," she said again, infusing her voice with all the authority she could muster, which might not be enough to circumvent their stupid search warrant, but certainly made them hesitate. "There are classified documents in that safe."

The Jerk in Charge, who had given his name, but Emily had missed it in her haste to ensure that the technician who would rip her safe open if she didn't open it for them had not arrived yet, reminded her that his classification was pretty high.

_Not that high, asshole_, she thought – but she knew better than to say it aloud.

At almost that precise moment the downstairs door bell sounded. Glaring at two men and two women tasked with turning her life inside out, daring them to try to answer the bell, Emily moved to the intercom.

"Yes?"

"Birdwell," a familiar voice announced. "State Department."

"About time," she said – unfairly, because he had actually made astonishing time given the distance he'd covered in DC traffic – and hit the buzzer to release the ground-floor locks.

Simultaneously, the lead investigator's cell rang. Jerk in Charge frowned, first at the faceplate and then at Prentiss, then hit Talk and said, "Stemmons" into his mobile. Whatever he heard, it generated an even deeper frown, accompanied by a certain stiffness in posture that hinted that whoever was on the line was substantially higher on the food chain than he was.

"Yes, ma'am," he said a couple times, in a classic _not-happy-about-this_ tone, his mouth in a long, thin straight line. Darken his hair, stretch him out an inch or so, lower his voice about a major third, and he could be Hotch fielding a call from Erin Strauss. "No, ma'am," he said, his brows narrowing. "No, ma'am, not yet."

Hell, for all she knew, it _was_ Erin Strauss on the line.

She could almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

She could hear light footsteps reaching to top of the stairs, crossing the hall, then a tap on her door.

Because she took nothing for granted, she peered through the peephole.

Julian Birdwell's blandly pleasant face smiled back at her.

She shot back the deadbolt and opened the door to admit her visitor.

"Good afternoon," he caroled to the agents, then lifted her hand and kissed it in passing. "Ms Prentiss," he purred. "A pleasure to be here – to make myself useful."

"Good to see you, too," she replied. "Try not to be too affectionate. Ernesto thinks we would make a cute couple."

"Ernesto flatters me," Julian said, and nodded at the older diplomat before turning his gaze to the IA agent.

Stemmons – Jerk in Charge – disconnected from his phone call and surveyed Birdwell without warmth. "State Department?" he asked sourly.

Birdwell made a small bow. "As, of course, is Signor Cavallieri," he replied. "Has the Deputy for–" 

"She has," Stemmons replied. "She has – in her words – superseded our search warrant." He looked as if he would like to spit, either on or at something. Or someone. "National security."

Julian beamed. "Well, bully for the old girl," he said. "She made quick work of it, didn't she?" he added to Emily and Ernesto. "I'll make us some tea and we can wait for the Bureau drones to pack up and leave."

"That would be lovely," Emily said, not even bothering to argue with him over whose kitchen it was and who was whose guest, anyway. She sat on the couch and patted the seat beside her. "Come sit down, Uncle Ernesto."

Looking more intrigued by the moment, the elderly diplomat settled onto the couch beside her. "I must say, this is impressive," he murmured, and she knew he was dying to learn what in the hell she could possibly have concealed in her safe that the State Department would race to protect.

She said nothing, just gave him an enigmatic smile. She did have objects and documents in her safe that were covered by national security concerns, things dating back to an intensely interesting previous career with Interpol and the CIA.

What set the Department scrambling, though, was the presence of a half-dozen exceptionally graphic and perverse pornographic DVDs. If you hated politics, as Emily did, then to survive, you had to know exactly where the power was. While she herself appeared on only one of the DVDs, all six featured Julian Birdwell and strategic bits of leather.

~ o ~

**3:34 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

"It's one of them Black Forest clocks," the alleged Brandy Mae observed, as Agent Rutherford vanished into Penelope's apartment building almost simultaneously with another agent's exit, hauling two sealed cardboard boxes of confiscated electronics. "One goes in, another comes out." She poked at the dashboard of the car a few times, then hissed, "God damn, doesn't anything work on this piece of crap?"

"What ain't working, Ma?" the putative Ricky Lee asked, his voice weary, clearly not the least bit interested in helping his so-called mother.

"Oh, the damn lighter."

Garcia watched them with a dizzying sense of wonder as they maintained their goofy cover, neither of them putting so much as a toe out of character.

"So," she said as Brandy Mae continued to thump the dash, "Do you two want to come in, maybe have a cup of tea?"

"Jesus, Mama," the familiar voice of Spencer Reid interrupted. "Here, use mine."

He plunked the cardboard box of scarves down on the hood of the car and bent to light … Erin Strauss's cigarette with a tiger-striped butane lighter. T_hat's it, I'm in Oz. Or the Twilight Zone. This is almost weirder than the whole arrest-the-team thing_.

But it was perfect cover, because federal agents were strongly advised not to smoke in public.

"If I inhale, I'll gag," Strauss murmured, her hand in front of her mouth.

"Then don't," Reid replied. "Just look unprofessional."

Strauss loosed a wild cackle. "No problem there," she said. "Garcia, what's the chance that your place has been bugged?"

Garcia considered that. "Probably less than ten percent," she replied, "but I'm not in the mood to take chances."

Brandy Mae and Ricky Lee nodded. Ricky Lee swiped his sleeve across his nose again and snorted. "Soon as your guests are gone," he said. "We'll watch what we say." A cigarette materialized in his fingers. He popped it between his lips and lit it.

"That is just wrong," Penelope said as he took a deep drag.

"I smoked as an undergraduate," he said from behind his sleeve. "It made me feel like a grownup. Or at least feel like I looked like a grownup. It isn't an art you unlearn."

Erin Strauss gave a delicate cough. "This isn't really that bad," she said. "Not as harsh as a doobie, anyway."

"I love both of you," Penelope breathed, dizzy with delight. "I mean, I really, really love you. As in, I want to bear your kittens."

~ o ~

**3:45 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

So there they were, the three of them, in separate but adjoining cells in the holding area of the Justice building. Morgan, the newest arrival, had one empty cell to his left, and Aaron Hotchner to his right. Hotch, in turn, was bracketed between Derek and David Rossi, whose own cell was last on the other end.

"I saw this guy in the hallway," Morgan said. "Huge, with a Frankenstein jaw and nightmare eyes, walks like Night of the Living Lawyers. I mean, even the other DoJ suits were giving him a lot of room. Nobody was rushing up to get close to him."

Rossi frowned, but Hotchner gave an unexpected bark of amusement. "Victor Wozniak," he told both men. "He's their star interrogator. I got to talk to him earlier this afternoon."

"He looks … evil," Derek confessed. "Like what's-his-name, Luca Brasi, from _The Godfather_, if he was, like, six-six."

"Started out in Chicago, has been posted pretty much everywhere, including consulting at Gitmo," Hotch continued.

Morgan moved closer to the bars that separated his cell from the unit chief's. "He looks like the kind who knows fifty legal ways to torture you."

Hotchner glanced up. "He does," he murmured.

"He does? Wait – you mean, he looks like the kind, or he really does know fifty legal ways?"

Hotch scrubbed at his face. "I don't know about fifty, but he sure knows about one."

Every protective cell in Morgan's body tensed. "Hotch," he said urgently, "did that man hurt you?"

Hotchner stretched out on the bunk and closed his eyes. "He did," he sighed.

Morgan was ready to bend the bars apart and track down the son of a bitch. "What did he do to you, man? Come on, you gotta be straight with me!"

Hotchner's eyes popped open and he stared at the ceiling tiles for a few seconds. "He sang," he said at last. "He sang 'The Locomotion,' the Grand Funk Railroad version. Repeatedly. _A capella_. Without mercy, and … with choreography."

"Hotchner, goddammit, I'm serious. What did he–"

"I kept asking for Carly Simon," Hotchner continued, lacing his hands across his chest, "or Whitney Houston, or even Katy Perry – but all I got was Grand Funk."

"He lies," said a low, rough voice.

Morgan looked up to see the Luca Brasi of the DoJ looming in the doorway.

"He lies like a rug," Wozniak said. "I also gave him some of my homemade frittatas with Portobello mushrooms and lemon–"

"That's true," Hotchner conceded.

"And they were fucking great frittatas, if I do say myself."

"You're right, they were fucking great frittatas."

Wozniak plodded over to the chief's cell. "And I also gave you Helen Reddy, you ungrateful jerk," he said, his voice accusatory.

"Yeesh," Hotchner groaned. "The _only_ good thing I can say about 'The Locomotion' was that it was easier to take than your version of 'I Am Woman.'"

Wozniak chuckled, and then, unexpectedly, so did Hotchner.

"You want to hear my Costello-does-Gershwin?" Wozniak growled, and when three voices shouted _No_, he ignored them.

"_You could have a great career,_" he sang in a smooth but nasal baritone, "_And you should, yes you should, One thing only stops you, dear – You're too good, way too good–"_

"Enough," Aaron groaned through his laughter.

Wozniak clasped his huge hands to his bosom. "_If you want a future, darling, Why don't you __get a past? Cause that fatal moment's coming at last …"_

"_We're all alone, no chaperone can get our number,_" David Rossi crooned from his end of the lock-up.

"Now you've done it," Hotch groused. "You've got him singing; we'll never get him out of here."

"_The world's in slumber,_" Rossi and Wozniak warbled, "_Let's misbehave ..._"

"All right, I'll talk! I'll talk!" Hotchner cried in melodramatic tones.

Wozniak loomed over him. "Hmm," he said. "Such a wuss." 

Morgan just shook his head, finally recognizing the kind of goofiness that broke the tension when the team had been under almost unendurable stress.

Whatever was going on out there, it weighed as heavily on the huge interrogator as it did on Hotchner. Probably more.

He hoped to hell the frittatas had really been exquisite, because the singing totally sucked.

~ o ~

**3:56 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

She had always sworn that she would never allow a smoker into her apartment, but she was prepared to make an exception for Brandy Mae and Ricky Lee, especially since neither one was doing much actual inhaling.

The two remaining FBI agents – well, there-in-an-official-capacity FBI agents – offered cool and detached nods as they loaded up the last of Garcia's electronics. Penelope watched them intently, wondering whether they really had (or were planning to) bug her place.

Just as she thought that the coast was at last getting clear, her downstairs buzzer sounded. She got up and walked to the door. "Who's there?" she asked.

An unfamiliar voice, smooth and cultured, said, "Birdwell, State Department, ma'am. I have business with Ms Penelope Garcia."

Penelope turned to her undercover guests with a frown. "State Department?" she whispered. "What kind of trouble am I in now?"

"Julian Birdwell?" Strauss said in an unhappy tone. "Good Lord, I wish I were dressed a little differently."

Reid waved a negligent hand. "I wouldn't worry about it," he breathed to Erin and Garcia. "I think he'll be delighted by your appearance. Mine, on the other hand – he's gonna laugh his ass off."

~ o ~

**4:53 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

The gatekeeper, such as she was, was a large and genial woman whose generous breasts and thighs challenged every dimension of her uniform. The holster, handcuffs, and radio on her belt jingled musically against her hips.

"We don't have visiting hours, honey," she said in tones of genuine sympathy. "Folks are here just for overnight, you know? We make exceptions for attorneys of record, of course, and for next of kin, but–"

Prentiss had not spent a substantial part of her professional life in deep cover without learning how to play it by ear.

"Well," she said, dropping her eyes, letting her lashes flutter, "we'll be next of kin in a couple months, you know?"

The guard beamed and said, "Oh, really? You go, girl! Which one's the lucky guy?"

"Oh," Emily said, vamping while she got her story straight, "he has no idea just how lucky he is."

"They never do, honey."

"Boy, isn't that the truth!" In the end, her selection process for choosing her alleged fiancé boiled down to this logic: _Sooner or later I'm gonna owe huge apologies to (a) the guy who is suddenly forced to play my boyfriend, and (b) Hotch, for pulling this stunt in the first place._

The guard laughed and asked again, "So who's the lucky fella?"

Thanks to her analysis, her choice was obvious, because it meant only one apology.

She fluttered her eyelashes again. "Aaron Hotchner." 


	11. All Creatures Great and Small

A/N 1: I know I originally said this would be 14 chapters, but although I still have my notes, I lost my outline in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2011, so I'm not positive how many chapters it's gonna take to get from Point Q to Point Z—but the journey has begun once again!

A/N 2: Not mine, yada yada.

Thank you always, always, to Esperanta, who's crazy enough to enjoy betaing my stuff!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Eleven**

**All Creatures Great and Small**

**3:59 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

"Is that Julian Birdwell?" Strauss—sorry, Brandy Mae—hissed again.

"Relax," Reid murmured, although he looked a little bit unsettled himself.

Garcia felt naked, helpless. In some senses, she didn't consider herself flesh and bone; she _was_ information technology. She was a hacker. It was better to be in handcuffs than separated from her computers.

If the world were operating the way it should, she would have been just a few keystrokes from understanding the source of Strauss's distress. But every single device she owned that could access the Internet was under the control of these jackasses from Ethics and Internal Affairs, an annoying offshoot of the Office of Professional Responsibility.

The Goddess, for the moment, was a mere mortal—and she didn't like it one damn bit.

At the bottom of the steps, as the last FBI agent departed with his second-to-the-last box of Garcia's electronics, a perfectly tailored young man in his late twenties or early thirties let himself in through the open door and peered up the steps. "Ms. Garcia?" he said. "Birdwell."

"You might as well come up," she said with a sigh. "Things aren't weird enough yet."

"Mm." He gave a thoughtful, professorial kind of nod, too old for his body. "I'm familiar with that sense. No worries."

She doubted him—anyone that Erin Strauss was keen to impress probably had a pretty low threshold for weird—but she stood aside for him as he mounted the stairs at a controlled, dare she say it, _state_ly pace. When he reached the top, he looked around at the three of them, at Reid and Strauss and herself, then blinked several times rapidly and arranged his face in a bland smile.

"Hey, man," Spencer Reid said, extending a hand to slap five. "Ricky Lee Butts. How they hangin', man?" Garcia flinched, and Erin Strauss looked as if she would be rather be any other place but there.

On the other hand, Garcia felt that things could have been worse. At least "Ricky Lee" hadn't offered the State Department guy recreational drugs or a blow job.

There was the briefest of hesitations, and the State Department professional slid his palm along Reid's as though it might be diseased. "Rather well, thank you, sir," he said smoothly. "Have you, ah, blown that nose recently, Mr. Butts?"

Reid wiped his face with his forearm, hawked, and spat on Garcia's second-best carpet. "I have now, man. Nice suit. Give ya twenty for it."

Birdwell blinked. "Thousand?"

"Nah."

"I rather thought not. Ms. Garcia, my credentials—" He presented State Department ID that indicated he was an Undersecretary for Education and Development, then took her limp hand and kissed it lightly.

Then, without batting an eye, he reached for Erin Strauss's hand. She actually whimpered in horror and glanced to her left and right as though in search of an emergency exit.

"'At's my ma," Reid told Mr. Birdwell. "Brandy Mae Stubbs. Not Butts. I'm from, ya know, a previous hook-up."

Birdwell bowed slightly, smiled, and kissed her hand. Poor Strauss just stood there, speechless, her face brick-red. Then Birdwell said, "My pleasure, ma'am. And did your son inherit your mind as well as your classic good looks and your fashion sense?"

Strauss might have whimpered; Garcia wasn't sure.

"She has no idea," Reid stage-whispered.

"Ah." As smoothly, Birdwell jerked his head toward Spencer Reid. "He was my roomie at Cal Tech," he said very softly, and stepped back a pace. "I guarantee, ma'am, that I don't bite. And this isn't my first rodeo." He winked at Strauss, who backed up as though she really needed to sit down, right now. "I'm here to terrorize the Feds, not you."

"Technically speaking, she's—" Reid began in a confidential hiss.

Julian Birdwell gazed heavenward. "_Aware_, thank you, Mr. Butts," he drawled. "Aware and capable of the occasional broad intuitive leap."

There was a clattering on the stairs as Rutherford and his colleague returned for their last load of her—her babies. Marvin, the lawyer who had appeared from nowhere earlier that day, trailed after them with a determined look on his face.

"Agent Egan?" Birdwell said to the taller of the two E and IA representatives.

"Rutherford," he replied. Simultaneously, the shorter one snapped, "Gage Egan here."

"Ah."

"Julian Birdwell, State." The young man presented his credentials to Egan. "If you'll be kind enough to check in with Chief Jeffries, you'll find that there's a national security issue here that your fellas weren't aware of when this mess began."

_National security?_ Penelope felt more baffled than ever. Was this friend of Reid's even really from the State Department? Was this a practical joke gone horribly wrong?

Egan took out his phone, looked at it suspiciously, and said to Rutherford, "I have a text here to call Jeffries."

"At any rate," Birdwell continued, "while no one can stop you from removing Technical Analyst Garcia's consumer electronics from the premises, there's a stay on their contents, forbidding you, at least for the moment, from accessing them." He smiled at Marvin the lawyer. "If you'd be so kind as to accompany her electronics to ensure the security of her data?"

Marvin the lawyer looked at Agent Egan, and then at her hesitantly.

Egan's mouth was a sour line. He nodded concurrence at Rutherford. Whatever he'd heard from his boss, it confirmed what Birdwell had told them.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd stay with the machines," Penelope said, finding that she could smile again—or at least fake it persuasively. "Believe it or not, things are going pretty well here."

"Yes," said Mr. Birdwell. "You can leave the Bureau to me. Sarah Clarence will fill you in on the details as necessary."

Garcia didn't know who Sarah Clarence was, but obviously Marvin did, because he perked right up. "Great," he said, seeming to relax. "I'll babysit your data, Ms. Garcia."

And Penelope stared at the two shabby apparent redneck clowns—and the State Department guy whose suit probably cost as much as a year at Cal Tech—and realized, yeah.

_Things are finally under control._

**~ o ~**

**4:56 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

Some new guy in a suit strolled into the holding cell area. He had a clipboard in one hand. He peered at the men in their cells as though matching up data. Finally, he said, "Mr. Hotchner?"

Hotch raised a hand casually. "Here," he said, like a third-grader at roll call.

"Your fiancée's here," the guy in the suit said. He thrust the clipboard at the Unit Chief. "Fill this out, please. You'll have five minutes. No physical contact."

"Ungh," Hotchner mumbled as he accepted the clipboard, obviously unprepared for any kind of improvisation. "Uh, thank you."

The guy vanished back off to their right, where everyone seemed to come from. Hotch kept gazing glumly off after him, as though in search of critical information.

"Fiancée," he mumbled at last, and displayed the clipboard to Rossi. "Jesus, Dave, they want her name."

Morgan suppressed a snicker at the chief's discomfiture. Two cells over, Rossi's enormous grin indicated that he shared Derek's feelings.

"Piece of cake," Rossi said. "You only have two choices: Garcia or Prentiss."

"Three," said Hotchner unhappily. "Wozniak tells me that Erin Strauss is in the wind."

Morgan didn't even want to think about that. "But do you really think she'd call herself your fiancée?" he asked, nodding across Hotchner's cell. "Wouldn't she go after the Italian Stallion over there?"

"Ehhhhh—" It was hard to tell whether Rossi was making a sound of disgust or had stopped himself dead from saying the Section Chief's name. Or Hotch's, for that matter. "I'm sorry, Aaron, that's just one of those sentences you never expect to hear in the English language. And you," he added, glaring at Morgan, "paybacks'll be _una_—" and he switched to something in Italian that sounded pretty freakin' threatening, judging from the passion of the delivery.

"You don't scare me," Derek said to Rossi. "Besides, there are four possibilities. It could be Reid in drag." He said it mainly to deflect Rossi's attention, and hadn't really expected it to cheer Hotch up; rather the opposite, if he was honest with himself. The horror-stricken look that flickered across Hotch's face was well worth whatever price he would eventually have to pay for it.

"True," Rossi added, clearly sharing Morgan's lack of sympathy. "On the plus side, they did specify no physical contact. Nobody's gonna expect you to play kissy-face through the bars."

Hotchner continued to shake his head at the form on the clipboard. "At least it doesn't say anything about swearing or attesting to it where the signature goes," he said finally. "It just says 'signature.' There's a space for 'visitor name', "relationship,' 'local residence,' then I sign it." He looked at Morgan, and then at Rossi. "It has to be Emily, right?" The pitiful hopefulness on his face kept both Derek and Dave struggling to seem at least marginally sympathetic.

"Play it safe," Rossi urged. "Write _Sweetums_."

Hotchner's eyes shot wide open. "For her _name_?"

"Or for the relationship," Dave continued. "Artistic. Leave it vivid but vague, since you're not sure which of those delicious damsels is your intended."

"Aw, Christ, Dave—"

"Or _Honey Lips_," Morgan suggested.

Apparently Rossi considered it a duel, because he was looking across at Derek, not at Hotch. "_Huggie-wuggles_."

"_Bootylicious_."

"_Love Puddles_."

Morgan glared at the senior profiler. "_Hotchy's Hootchiemama_."

"You just keep this up," the chief growled without looking up at either of them, his voice low and steady as he scribbled on the official form, "and I'll insist even under torture that one of you two is Aaron Hotchner. There are some things that are actually worth a perjury rap."

**~ o ~**

**5:00 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

A man who'd grown a little portly for his cheap suit entered the waiting area and handed a clipboard to the uniformed guard. The guard looked down at whatever forms were on it and grinned. "Your fiancé has a sense of humor, Ms Prentiss," she said.

That gave her a bit of pause. While Aaron Hotchner occasionally let loose with some piece of snark pretty much out of nowhere, for the most part he was about as straight-up and by the book as you could hope for in a career bureaucrat. _Do I want to know what's on that form? _She made herself smile. "Yes," she lied smoothly. "It's one of his most endearing qualities."

She followed the guy whose suit no longer quite fit into a small room that reminded her of canteens at cop shops and junior colleges—a dozen or so plastic chairs gathered around a pair of scarred Formica tables, a bank of vending machines along one wall—and into a long narrow room with long narrow tables arrayed along its right side and four barred cells to the left.

Her first thought was, _oh, my God, it's all three of them! _She'd known about Hotch and Rossi; Morgan was a complete surprise.

But there they were, all three of them behind bars, all three of them sitting on their bunks and looking at her with interested eyes. All three with their jackets and shoes off. All three looking completely relaxed, as if they belonged there.

And her second thought was less _jail_ than _zoo_.

She allowed herself a split second to imagine what the little informational signs might say in the Federal Holding Zoological Park, going right to left and ignoring the vacant cell.

**The Derek Morgan (_hominus urbus toughassii_)**

Range: Illinois, Metro DC

Diet: Thai, Szechuan, beer

Mating Rituals: opportunistic

**The Aaron Hotchner (_hominus urbus crankyassii_)**

Range: Metro DC

Diet: Steak, Indian, bourbon

Mating Rituals: pair bonds for life

**The David Rossi (_hominus urbus smartassii_)**

Range: ubiquitous

Diet: Italian, French, single malt scotch

Mating Rituals: serial monogamy

"Mr. Hotchner," her escort announced, interrupting her little flight of fancy. "Your visitor."

The Unit Chief, still seated on his bunk, his elbows on his knees, glanced up at her. "Good afternoon, Prentiss," he said.

She just stood there for a moment, still trying to pry herself out of her zoo mindset and wondering why she wasn't the least bit surprised that Hotch called his alleged fiancée by her last name, and thanking the gods of law enforcement that nobody had yet expected him to do any undercover work.

"Emily," Rossi said, concern in his voice.,"is everything all right?"

"I'm sorry," she blurted. "I didn't bring any peanuts to throw to you guys."

Morgan's voice was mildly amused. "You think this is a zoo?"

Rossi laughed. "Better be a petting zoo."


	12. The Word from East Armpit

**A/N 1:** I know I said that this would be 14 chapters, but although I still have my notes, I lost my outline in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2011, so I'm not positive how many chapters it's gonna take to get from Point Q to Point Z—but the journey has begun once again.

**A/N 2:** Not mine, yada yada.

Thank you as always to Esperanta, who actually enjoys betaing my stuff!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Twelve**

**The Word from East Armpit**

**5:02 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner **

Prentiss kept looking at him oddly. He wasn't sure whether it was because she was viewing him from beyond a set of bars, or because he'd just identified her as his "Baby Mama." He didn't feel apologetic about that at all—if he was expected to just, _snap_, like _that_, adapt to having a fiancée, then she could by-God, _snap_, like _that_, adapt to having a child. Or two. Or at least one discreetly in the oven.

"It's Wallingford, I'm pretty sure," she said quietly. He sensed Morgan and Rossi moving to the near ends of their own cells, not about to miss a word. "The trial's set for next month, and the principal witnesses for the prosecution were Colonel Moyer and his wife—and you and Rossi."

Yes. The two brothers who took young boys, notably General Wallingford's grandson, in Maine in January and February of that year. He and Dave had done that one on their own, while the rest of the team dealt with the post-rescue interviews of the victims of the self-styled Slave King in Montana. The Wallingford boy had survived, but had been too traumatized to do anything but point mutely at pictures of his captors.

"But we're not critical to the prosecution," Aaron said. "The Moyers are."

"They're both dead," Emily told him. "They were in an auto accident in July. He died a few days afterward, never regained consciousness. She got better, went home, but she died too, about a month later. I don't have all the details yet. That means that you two—" her eyes flickered to Rossi and back to Hotch "—are it. You two, a couple shaky eye witnesses, and a little bit of circumstantial evidence. Hasn't anyone from the prosecution called you about it yet?"

"But they're just some guys, down-east good old boys, a couple fishermen, right?" Morgan said. "And this operation—it must have cost somebody a fortune to pull off."

"Far be it from me to deal in ethnic stereotypes," said Rossi—which was a laugh, considering his extensive repertoire of hopelessly politically incorrect jokes—"but they were, what? They were Albanians, right? Ditmar and somebody Sallaj, what was the brother's name?"

"Juxhin," Aaron supplied automatically. Reid might be the brains, but he was still the memory of the BAU. "But there were no indications they were tangled up in anything organized. They didn't have much in the way of resources, no weapons, and neither one owned a computer. They used low-end cell phones, asked for a public defender."

Rossi raised an elegant eyebrow at Aaron—the gesture somewhat weakened by coming from behind bars—and said, "But the Albanian mob can be brutal, heavy-handed, and it's fairly well-funded."

"And they don't hesitate to kill federal officials," Morgan said. "Unless somebody offers me proof that it's just a sick coincidence, there's Ms. Chen—she went chasing a lead I gave her and she's dead over by the Hunnicutt Projects."

"You have any idea where Reid is?" Aaron asked Emily. "Or Garcia?"

"Or Strauss?" Rossi added.

Prentiss nodded. "Garcia's at home. I had a friend of mine talk to Sarah, the lawyer you sent me. Then he went over to her house to give her some support. I haven't heard anything from Reid." She wrinkled her nose. "I can't think why I would want to contact Strauss."

Hotchner sighed deeply. "Because she's on the run," he said.

It was actually kind of gratifying watching Prentiss's face as she absorbed that little factoid. Her eyes about popped out of her face. "She's _what?_"

Aaron touched his right hand to his heart and raised it solemnly. "Before God, Prentiss. My source—and he's a big source—"

"A _really_ big source," Rossi added. "Like six-six, easy."

Hotchner ignored the interruption. "He swears that she was an unindicted co-conspirator and she's in the wind."

"Strauss," Prentiss repeated, as though she might have misunderstood, or maybe Aaron had slipped and said the wrong name.

"Erin Strauss," he said. "I know, I don't get it either. Unless somebody let it slip to her."

"Like who?" Morgan contributed. "Reid?"

"Yeah," Rossi snarled, "like when Reid finally decides he's going on the run—"

"Whoa," Aaron said, holding up a hand to both of them. "The last word we've had _officially_ is that Spencer Reid broke a tooth this morning. He called in when I was on the way down here, said he was trying to get hold of his dentist."

He was a dreadful liar, and he knew it, but there was no attorney-client privilege in this little corner of the Federal Building—so Lord alone knew who was listening in, and _technically_, the last _word_ had been Reid's call. _Seeing_ him booking out of the BAU that morning hadn't been a _word_. As long as he felt that on some level, he was just putting a spin on actual and provable facts so they looked a little different, well—that wasn't really a lie.

Much.

If a witness pulled that in court, Aaron would cheerfully (figuratively) eviscerate him and leave him dripping (figurative) guts all over the witness stand. But this wasn't court; it was the Federal Building, and these were his friends, his family, his team.

"Fine," Rossi growled. "When he got out of _the dentist's office_, maybe he called Strauss."

Aaron looked at Rossi. Prentiss looked at Rossi. Hotch was pretty sure Morgan was looking at Rossi, too, but he was damned if he'd turn around and confirm it.

"I think he'd rather have the toothache," Morgan said. "I know I would."

**~ o ~**

**5:05 PM**

**Spencer Reid**

He leaned way back against the rear seat cushions in Julian's Town Car with a contented sigh. For the first time since the warrants had come through, he felt safe—or at least relatively so. Birdwell was still pretty young for the State Department, but, like Reid, he'd been a prodigy, just nineteen months older than Spencer himself in college. That had given him a huge head start. He was a lot of things, including twisted and troubled and ambitious, but Spencer had never known him to be anything but absolutely trustworthy.

Beside him, Garcia was lost to everything but the laptop that he and Strauss had procured for her. She bent, fussing with it, murmuring things to herself that Reid could barely hear, and couldn't understand when he did hear them.

Finally she looked up and stared straight forward at the back of Julian's head. "We'll have to get to a library or a cafe immediately," she announced. "They took my phone, and that was my hub-on-the-fly."

Reid didn't bother to share that he didn't understand that, either. They'd gone around and around about it when they first met. He didn't particularly care for information technology—of course, _she_ said that he was just being snobby because he didn't _need_ it, and maybe she was just a _little_ bitty bit right—and he actively resisted learning new and wonderful things about it. She would say _but you're a doctor of engineering_, and he would say, _mechanical, Garcia_, and she would say _this is a mechanism_, and he would say, _show me the moving parts _and then they would retreat to their respective corners and pout.

"No problem," Julian replied, "but I think Ms. Strauss wants to get into fresh clothes first."

Erin, who had already yanked all the curlers from her hair and was teasing it into shape in the front passenger seat, growled, "I feel like a two-dollar skank."

Reid resisted the cheap shot of asking her how she knew what a two-dollar skank felt like. Instead, he reached forward and tugged at the edge of her halter top. "Why?" he whined, keeping up the Ricky Lee style of talking. "Come on, Ma—I kinda like ol' Brandy Mae."

"God," Strauss groaned, "I'm so embarrassed."

"Don't be," said Julian. "You want to know why Spence is so good at being 'Ricky Lee'? It's because he's doing _me_. When we met, I was kind of 'Ricky Lee.' No shit—I had no manners, no taste, no class, and a Tennessee goober accent so shrill it set off car alarms."

"He isn't kidding," Reid confirmed. "Smart as a whip, already spoke—what was it, eleven?—eleven languages perfectly, without a trace of an accent, but not his English."

"If I thought about it," Julian said, "I could speak like an educated man. If I didn't—" his tone rose in pitch and acquired a country accent. "—hay-ull, ah was still Julie Dan Birdwell, outta purt-much East Armpit, Tennessee."

"But not literally," Reid said.

Birdwell laughed. "Damn near. Y'aw ain't lived 'til you been a scrawny six-foot redneck named _Julie_." As quickly as it had appeared, his country accent vanished. "But that gift for languages was my ticket out of poultry farming. Then I met Spence, as big a fish out of water as I was, for some of the same reasons and some different ones."

"Yeah," Reid said with a low chuckle. He was still maintaining his Ricky Lee persona more out of affection than to annoy Erin Strauss—though her discomfiture was definitely a factor. "And them-thar poultry ain't never recovered from the loss."

"When you're all done with the b-g deets," Garcia muttered, "I need a connection, and I need it now."

"Wait-wait-wait, 'b-g deets'?" Reid said. "That's English?"

Birdwell looked at Reid in the rear view mirror and gave a sharp descending whistle, like an artillery round. "Incoming clue!" he called. "Catch it! 'Background details.'"

_Oh, for God's sake—it's only one syllable more to say it right._

"We have to stop at a gas station," Erin Strauss said, "so I can change clothes."

The ever-pragmatic Penelope barely glanced up. "You can stay in the car, ma'am, I don't need anyone to hold my hand while I do this."

Birdwell laughed aloud. "I'll bet you two get along just fine," he said.

"Who, us?" Reid gasped, and almost simultaneously, he and Garcia jerked their heads toward each other and said, "No people skills."

**~ o ~**

**5:24 PM**

**David Rossi**

A heavy-set woman in a corrections uniform entered the room where the cells were located, interrupting some spirited speculation about organized crime. Her equipment rattled on her heavy belt as she moved. "Miss Prentiss?" she said to Emily. "Your visiting time is up."

Prentiss, who had dragged one of the big wooden office chairs across the room from the long tables, and was now seated in front of the center cell—Aaron's—consulted her phone. "Oh, no way—it was 5:00 when I came in here. I have six more minutes!"

Hotchner—trust him to say exactly the wrong thing—said, "It's no problem. We didn't have anything else to say," which in a universe of real engagements and real fiancées would have earned him a sharp slap across the puss from any woman worth her salt. Prentiss got it, and her eyes narrowed dangerously, but only for Aaron's (and Dave's) benefit.

"Well, we have some situations we're dealing with," the corrections officer said, "so we'll have to cut it a little short. But, listen, honey, what I said about no physical contact? We can relax that a little bit. I'll just turn my back and you can sneak him a little sugar, OK? 'Course, you'll still have witnesses, but it's better than nothing, right?"

It was a tough call which of the happy couple looked less happy about this opportunity, but both of them murmured polite thank-yous at the guard, who pointedly faced the opposite wall and said, "Knock yourselves out, kids."

It was, Dave thought, possibly the frostiest indulgence in a little sugar that he'd ever seen. Emily leaned her forehead against the bars on her side; Aaron leaned forward on his side. He reached through the bars and squeezed one of her hands with one of his own, whispering to her so softly Rossi couldn't catch it.

She was whispering something back when that enormous interrogator, Wozniak, strode into the room.

"Oh, sorry to interrupt," he boomed without apology. "Keep it up, folks, just don't do anything I wouldn't do." Then he beamed toothily at Rossi. "You're Rossi, right?"

No sense in denying it. "Yeah."

"You're in luck, man. Lovebirds are busy, so I'll talk to you, how does that sound?"

"I'll only be a minute," Aaron told him.

"Oh for God's sake, be a _mensch_, Hotchner," Wozniak growled. "You've got your honey there. Make every moment with her count. Come on, Rossi—let's do this, man."

Rossi slipped into his shoes and jacket. He expected Wozniak to cuff him, but apparently he counted on his size and his fearsome reputation to cow his prisoners. Come to think of it, Aaron hadn't been cuffed when he'd returned from his most recent visit with the interrogator. The two had been conversing in low tones with serious expressions on their faces, but there hadn't been any sense of a threat about it—other than the fact that Wozniak looked, well, scary.

But he liked to sing.

And he allegedly made a hell of a frittata.

Wozniak unlocked the cell door himself—evidently the chick in the uniform wasn't the only person with a key—and held it open, gesturing for Rossi to join him.

"And if you'd do me the honor of looking at least a little bit frightened," Wozniak rumbled.

Rossi smiled weakly. "Won't be that much of a stretch, pal."


	13. Changes of Plan

A/N 1: OK, official word: There will be 15 chapters and an epilogue. I know where I was going, but I lost track of how I got from here to there in only 13 and an epilogue (sigh). As always, I own nothing and nobody except for the goofy idea and some original characters. Also as always, thanks to Esperanta, who makes me look so good.

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Thirteen**

**Changes of Plan**

**5:30 PM**

**David Rossi**

To start with, there were no frittatas.

Wozniak led him into a small, perhaps seven-by-nine room with unfriendly light green walls, a table (bolted to the floor), and three chairs (one of which was also bolted to the floor). Rossi wondered whether this was the same room where Aaron and Derek had been interrogated. He was pretty sure Wozniak intended for him to sit in the chair that was fastened down, so he deliberately walked around it and sat down in the one that faced it.

Wozniak said nothing, just seated himself in the one that was bolted down. He sat sideways because his great arachnid legs didn't quite properly fit under the table. "You've got a nice singing voice," he said.

Right, they'd sung a bit of "Let's Misbehave" together.

Rossi'd taught interrogation for years and he had to hand it to the guy: He was either a total amateur or unbelievably good. Nothing he was doing was making any damn sense at all. And since Aaron had identified him as one of the Justice Department's star interrogators, he supposed this was some of his star-turn stuff.

Wozniak smiled. "Call me Vic," he said.

Rossi smiled back. "How ya doin', Vic?" he replied. "Feel free to call me Supervisory Special Agent Rossi."

Wozniak was unruffled. "No problem, SSA Rossi. Aaron's response was different. I said 'Call me Vic,' and he said, 'Oh, and does that make me Perp?'"

Rossi doubted that Hotchner would ever start out in interrogation by being a smartass—he was representing the Bureau and the Team, so he'd start out all straight-up Unit Chief—but he said nothing and let nothing show in his eyes.

"Of course," Wozniak continued, "we were further along in our conversation when I first made that offer to Aaron. Way further along. He started out with that fucking Unit Chief stick up his ass. But eventually I figured out which way the wind was blowing. We got pretty _simpatico_ as we went along, and I modestly claim that my kickass frittatas helped." He leaned his bony elbows on the table. "I was gonna call him back, but he and Agent Prentiss were pretending to be all honey-bunchy, so here we are."

He reached below the table and produced a tablet computer. "I'd appreciate it if you could take a look at this picture."

It was a surveillance photograph of a tall, thin, young man in a well-tailored suit. The young man, Rossi didn't recognize; the location, he surely knew. He stood in the hallway of Emily Prentiss's apartment building. The Team as a whole had enjoyed making up captions for a particularly ambiguous-looking painting that hung in that corridor, and Dave could see the painting off to the man's left, Rossi's right.

But mentioning that he recognized Prentiss's apartment building could raise a whole bunch of unnecessary issues.

"I've never seen him before," Rossi replied.

"His name is Birdwell," Wozniak told him. "Julian D. Birdwell, of the State Department. Has one of those vague official titles that don't really describe his function."

"Like 'Analyst Victor Wozniak'?"

Wozniak beamed. "Exactly!"

"You might try asking Agent Prentiss then," Dave said. "She has pretty extensive connections with State through her mom."

"Mm, yes, she most assuredly does," Wozniak purred. "And have you any idea why the State Department might want to control what kind of access Justice has to evidence that might or might not be in the possession of Agent Prentiss or Analyst Garcia?"

Rossi shook his head silently.

"Let me put all my cards on the table," the interrogator continued. "You're being set up. That little fact is slowly percolating its way up the Department of Justice food chain, and I'm sure you know all about the mills of justice."

_Mills_, not _wheels_. Rossi recalled his conversation with Aaron and his lawyer earlier in the day referring to that particular poem. Had they been recorded? Certainly they'd been overheard. He wished he could recall whether they'd been officially in lawyer-client privilege status at that time.

"How about Ricky Lee Butts?" Wozniak said.

Rossi shook his head again.

"Brandy Mae Stubbs?"

"Sorry, never heard of her or the other guy, either."

"So you have no idea why Butts and Stubbs and Analyst Garcia would all pile into Birdwell the Cookie Pusher's vehicle and drive away like old buddies."

"I'm sorry, is that a question or a statement?"

A negligent shrug from Wozniak. "Take your pick."

"Butts and Stubbs sounds like the setup for a cigarette joke," Rossi observed.

"Mm. Interesting."

"Interesting?"

"Because both Butts and Stubbs smoke." Apparently realizing that he sounded ambiguous, he said, "Both Mr. Butts and Ms. Stubbs smoke cigarettes."

Rossi just barely resisted batting his eyes. "I smoke cigars."

"Supervisory Special Agent Rossi, believe it or not, I _am_ on your side here," Wozniak growled. "Your buddy Morgan gave us the first clue. We have compelling evidence that some aspects of his alleged banking activities were a very sharp, very credible setup. Whoever's behind the setup is almost certainly behind the murder of one of our prosecutors, Ms. Chen. Now exactly how much of my undies do I have to show you to convince you that you and I and Aaron and Morgan and probably the rest of your buddies, we're all on the same team here?"

"Vic, I don't care if you're my first cousin on my mama's side, I don't know any whatsisname Butts or Stubbs. And no singing or cooking or anything else is gonna change that."

Wozniak slid another surveillance picture into view. As Rossi stared, Wozniak leaned a little closer across the table. "Your irises tell me that you recognize them."

"Oh, holy crap," Rossi groaned.

**~ o ~**

**5:42 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

Morgan and Hotch had about decided to pool their change and treat themselves to something from the vending machines when the uniformed jailer—jail attendant—whatever the hell her job description was—came in again. This time, Morgan's lawyer, Norma, was trailing after her, heels clicking sharply on the tiles, armed with purse, briefcase, and an armload of papers and manila envelopes.

"Morgan?" the jailer said, as though there was a huge population to choose from.

"Over here," Morgan said, automatically slipping into his shoes, anticipating a trip to one of the attorney-client meeting rooms.

"Your lawyer." The officer had apparently trained for her job by majoring in Obvious.

"Derek's in trouble, Derek's in trouble," Hotchner singsonged so softly that it was audible only to Morgan.

_Honestly, take away his credentials, stick him behind bars, and the Unit Chief's goofy streak just pops right out._ He shook his head slightly, not about to let Hotch see him grin.

"Agent Morgan!" Norma said, smiling broadly. "You're sprung; the prosecutors have dropped all their bail requests. I'm here to collect you and take you home."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that." Norma continued to smile, but Morgan thought there was a forced undertone to it. "O.R., baby! You're free on your own recognizance," she told him. "And I'll bet you'll be wanting to stop for something to eat, too."

"So—what about the thing with Ms. Chen?"

"You've been cleared of any complicity."

She stood back and watched jail-person unlock the door, as did Derek. From this angle, he could see that the little silver nameplate on her uniform said Attendant Malloy. _Attendant_, as in _lavatory attendant_. No wonder she had some power issues.

Morgan pretended interest in the unlocking mechanism and watched Norma surreptitiously. When she thought he was looking elsewhere, her smile faded almost to nonexistence. He raised his head deliberately and—_bam, just like that_—the smile was back, warm and positive and professional.

Derek leaned against the bars on the side of his cell. "Hey, Hotch?"

Hotchner glanced up at him, once more all professional mask.

"You got any problems with this?"

Hotchner looked at him, at Norma, at Malloy the Attendant, slowly and deliberately. "Me? Of course not. Go home, kick down your door, take a shower, let it go. Why? Does something about this make you feel uncomfortable?"

Morgan struggled to identify the hinky sensations he was getting and couldn't even define them to his own satisfaction, let alone anyone else's. Whatever was going on, he figured he could probably handle it. "It seems a little sudden," he said finally.

"It does," Hotch agreed. "But is it unwelcome?"

"Oh, hell, no."

"Then go."

He followed Norma and Malloy through the vending machine area, signed several forms at the front window, went through the possessions he'd surrendered upon entering the holding cells and signed for them, and followed Norma down a long, shadowy corridor.

"Is there something I should know?" he asked her quietly once they were out of earshot of anyone else.

"I suspect that someone may be gunning for you," Norma murmured back. "I parked out in plain sight—illegally, but in plain sight—because I figure anyone who wants you gone's gonna wait until there aren't many witnesses around."

He felt naked without his creds and weapons. "I need to run out to Q," he said. "I have some stuff in my locker—"

"Not happening," Norma told him. "You're still on administrative leave. Nobody's come right out and said you're innocent yet. Show up there and you'll be back behind bars before you can click your ruby red slippers together."

"I need a weapon."

Norma turned to him, short and solemn and scared. "I brought you one, but it's in the car. I couldn't very well bring it through the metal detectors."

_My lawyer brought me a gun._

_Why does that make me even more nervous?_

**~ o ~**

**5:55 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner**

It was actually kind of a nice cell, a clean one, unconnected with any criminal population—_if you didn't count Rossi_, he reminded himself with a small secret smile. _And me. Imagine that._ The lawyers who represented people who had money and pull would collect their clients from here, and the Powers That Be knew better than to let it have the feel of a hell hole. Theoretically, the bars and the lack of privacy would daunt any poor soul in custody who was burdened by a guilty conscience.

He'd spent substantial chunks of his professional life in and out of prisons of all kinds, from small town sheriffs' pokeys to Super-maximums, both state penitentiaries and the federal Supermax in Colorado. He found it difficult to believe that they really thought they would somehow intimidate him with a holding cell. Probably it was just part of their usual approach and they didn't see any need to adjust it.

Nevertheless, this _arrested but not quite arrested_ business felt wrong, and not just on a legal level. On a logical level, it was either a criminal matter, or a matter for Internal Affairs. There was no prosecutorial advantage in trying to play it both ways.

_Idiots_.

He looked habitually for a watch that wasn't there, peered along the wall to view the big institutional clock on the wall between the cells and the canteen area, noticed that it had been less than an hour since since Dave and Wozniak had left. He would likely be there for at least two hours, maybe three.

There's a school of thought that's convinced that only the guilty can sleep in jail. It's wrong, of course. Those who are both confident of their innocence and well informed about how the system works—and why it works that way—can be similarly serene.

Aaron Hotchner wrapped his suit jacket around his shoes to form a pillow, and lay down on the thin mattress, instructing himself to shut down and take a nap while he had the chance.

Being a criminal mastermind was tiring work.

**~ o ~**

**5:59 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

They'd passed twenty-eight perfectly good wi-fi sites and this Birdwell jerk just kept driving. Finally he pulled in at the freaking Watergate complex. Beside her, Spencer Reid groaned, "Such a showoff." Erin Strauss, in the front seat, started whimpering in embarrassment all over again.

Garcia just clutched the new electronics to her bosom. Now that she was sure all the right software, her personally designed software, was on the machine, all she needed was a freaking connection. Any damn _Starbucks_ would have been fine. Even freaking _Denny's_ had wi-fi, for crying out loud.

Some doof in a valet parking uniform appeared at the driver's side window, and Birdwell told everyone to get out.

_Fine. I'm sure the freaking Watergate has wi-fi. Every self-respecting hotel has wi-fi these days, and I can get around the utter permeability of public connections. Just give me a freaking chance._

Clinging to her new laptop like a fragile newborn, she trailed after a confident Birdwell, a casually loping Reid, and an apparently mortified Strauss through a hushed, elaborately luxurious lobby kind of thing—_just steer me to a goddamn media room already_—and into an elevator.

Eventually she figured out that she was in the co-op section of the complex, not the hotel part. Birdwell swiped a door and ushered the FBI employees into a—really, really nice kind of apartment, fragrant with citrus and clove and incense and liberally scattered with what looked like really nice _objets d'art_, way beyond the tchotchkes that cluttered her own apartment. Art prints—some of them decidedly, ah, _explicit _in their subject matter—lined the walls.

Birdwell opened a drawer and took out a pen. On the back of one of his business cards, he wrote _km&f4+L3bYd9_. He thrust it at Penelope. "My password for today," he said. "That table should be adequate for your needs."

"This place is—" Erin Strauss gasped, "—simply exquisite, Mr. Birdwell. Oh, my God, is that an original Tanguy—"

"Yeah," Birdwell said negligently.

"Looks like somebody's teeth knocked out on a beach," Spencer Reid said, apparently under the impression that he was still Ricky Lee Butts. He hawked and spat and said, "Damn. Looks like Pier One came in here and threw up all over the place."


	14. Hap Nez Something

A/N: Just so we're all clear on this: There will be 15 chapters and an epilogue. I know where I was going, but I lost track of how I got from here to there in only 13 and an epilogue (sigh). As always, I own nothing and nobody except for the goofy idea and some original characters. Also as always, thanks to Esperanta, who makes me look so good.

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Fourteen**

**Hap Nez Something**

**6:47 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

The autumn sun was beginning to boil away into a red sky and the wind had turned chilly as Prentiss's cab pulled into the parking lot. Today had been, Emily decided, right up there with some of the weirdest days of a life that positively teemed with weird days. More than almost anything else, she wanted a long hot shower and a stiff brandy, but she couldn't in good conscience treat herself to either until she was sure everyone was safe.

As she reached through the partition to pay the cabbie, she spotted Deputy Undersecretary Ernesto Cavallieri preparing to climb into his limousine.

"Keep the change," she blurted to the driver, and surged out of the cab. "Uncle Nessie!" she called, waving energetically.

Ernesto spotted her, smiled, and as she jogged toward him, he seemed to relax. He opened his arms wide; whether she wanted a hug or not, she was about to get one, so she lunged into it, grateful for the physical contact.

"I was so worried," he said. "I called you and called you, and I got no answer."

"I'm sorry, Uncle," she murmured into the lapels of his huge flapping overcoat. "I left my phone at home. I didn't want to make it easier for anyone who was tracking me."

"Smart little confection," he said. "Such a good head on your pretty little shoulders, but you had all of us so worried!"

She backed off a pace. "All of us? Like who? You, Julian, and who else?"

"Your little friends, Ms. Garcia and some friends of _il mio piccolino Giuliano_."

Her heart soared: She'd met Julian through Spencer Reid. (And she would never square the man with Ernesto's _my little-bitty Giuliano_; nothing little about Julian, let alone possessed by Ernesto—unless Julie was even more sexually adventurous than she knew.)

_Did that mean that Spencer was with Garcia, that they'd connected? They've been trying to reach me?_

"Come on inside, Uncle," she urged. "It's getting cool out here. I'll make you a nice cup of tea and we'll see what's in the cookie jar."

"And a bit of brandy," Ernesto said. "A nice nip of brandy. One of Giuliano's friends is named Brandy."

"Sure," she said absently. She didn't know any friend of Reid's whose name was Brandy, and she was distracted, surveying the parking lot and its surroundings for evidence of surveillance teams. She saw nothing, but the area offered plenty of cover for a skilled operative.

_If you're there, big deal. I'm home. No big surprise to anyone, right?_

She unlocked the outer door and shooed Ernesto ahead of her into the lobby of the building, wishing that she were armed.

**~ o ~**

**6:48 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

Derek had a gun, and it wasn't actually doing much to improve his sense of security. He sat across from Norma, his nervous little lawyer, in a back booth at a Denny's gazing glumly out the window and studying each passing car—and this soon after rush hour, that was a whole lot of cars—with a suspicion bordering on paranoia.

When his phone sounded, he yanked it out of his pocket so rapidly that he almost tore the fabric. He didn't recognize the name or number, but it had called him twice previously, before he'd turned his phone back on.

"Morgan," he announced in a neutral tone.

"Oh, Derek, it's me. And I'm so glad you're available now. Are you OK?"

"Baby Girl," he said, relief flooding him. "I'm fine, sweetheart. Tell me you're OK, Baby Girl."

Norma the lawyer gnawed fretfully on one of her nylon-tipped nails and gave him a look that said _Is this a good call? _He nodded reassuringly—_Wait, why am I reassuring _her_? She's the lawyer! _Norma relaxed and resumed her obsessive study of options available to her among the Breakfast Slams.

"I'm fine, my hero," the familiar voice purred. "Better still now that I know you're out there and not locked up."

"Not so sure about that," he said. "My lawyer thinks I'm out here because I'll be easier for them to get to."

"But—"

"But if they can get to me, then I can get to them, too. It's a pain in the ass not having a car yet, but I'm gonna be collecting my pickup truck after dinner and I'll feel a little more on top of things. How are _you_ doing, sweet thing?"

"Me? Oh, my Chocolate Prince, I'm reclining here in the lap of luxury at the Watergate."

"For real, Baby Girl?"

"For real, Sweet Cheeks. High government officials are plying me with Benedictine and these yummy freaking dark chocolates from Egypt, and—" Her voice dropped and developed an odd, significant tone to it. "—I'm _exploring_, if you get my meaning. I'm _going places_."

He thought about that for a few seconds. _She's online, she isn't supposed to be, and she believes that this conversation may be monitored._

"Good to hear, Baby Girl," he told her. "You know where anyone else is?"

"I can't say anything for sure," Garcia replied, "except that Prentiss is at home. She's turned off her cell phone."

"Meh, I'd just as soon they know where I am," Morgan said. "That way, I know where they are, too. Any word from Hotch and Rossi, or are they still in jail?"

"Far as I know. You take care of yourself, Derek, do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Because this is all too weird, Derek. Too weird even for me, and I _like_ weird."

**~ o ~**

**6:50 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner **

"Hey."

Hotchner was awake in an instant, eyes wide open, recalling exactly where he was and what was going on. _Wozniak's voice, but Rossi isn't back yet, so something's going on. _He sat up and turned toward the front of the cell, where the interrogator loomed with one chummy arm slung up against the bars.

"What's up, Vic?"

"Oh, not much, Perp," Wozniak rumbled. He displayed a tablet computer. "Recognize this guy?"

He nodded. "Sure. Julian Birdwell. He's with the State Department."

"And how do you know him?"

He considered his answer carefully. "Through colleagues at the Bureau."

"Does the name Ricky Lee Butts mean anything to you?"

_Oh, shit._

Hotch saw no course but careful accuracy. "The only Ricky Lee I know is a fictional character that one of my colleagues likes to pretend to be to annoy one of his college friends."

"The college friend being Mr. Birdwell?"

Hotchner rolled the tension out of his neck and shoulders. "Sounds to me as if you already have a bunch of answers."

Wozniak ran his finger across the surface of the tablet, scrolling another image into place. "And what can you tell me about this charming couple?"

_Christ._

He knew that his face showed nothing. He also knew that Wozniak saw his recognition anyway. He drew a long, deep breath and let it out slowly.

"If he looked like Ricky Lee instead of just sounding like him, that's probably what he would look like," he said evenly.

"And his true identity?"

"Why are you asking me, Vic? You already know these answers."

"And yet I'm wasting my time standing here, waiting for yours," Wozniak growled. "What's it gonna be, pal?"

"It's Spencer Reid."

"And his mama?"

_Oh, God, no, don't make me look at her…._

Aaron Hotchner forced himself to look at the blowsy, cheap-looking matron in the curlers and the drooping halter top and fought to maintain a straight face, fought to maintain what few shreds of his professionalism he could still command. Fought the urge to giggle that bubbled up almost painfully in his chest.

"That's my supervisor," he said, desperately struggling to sound calm, matter-of-fact. Normal. "That's Section Chief Erin Strauss."

_Take it away, I can't keep my face straight another minute._

"Ah," Wozniak said. "Thanks for clarifying that. She generally dress that way?"

Hotchner dared to raise his eyes and saw that Wozniak was also fighting to keep his features straight. He was good at it, probably as good at it as Aaron, but it was a huge effort.

"So the big question here," Aaron said softly, "is, which one of us will break first?"

"Oh, Jesus—" Wozniak squeaked, and lost it.

_No shame in cracking up when the other guy does it first…. _

**~ o ~**

**6:56 PM**

**Emily Prentiss **

She poured from the kettle over the tea balls, watching them them bob and swirl in the hot water.

"I don't want any of those flavory things," Ernesto called from the living room.

"Flavory?" she echoed as she carried the tray into the living room."Everything has a taste, Nessie—"

Her honorary uncle turned and beamed at her from where he'd been examining a small ceramic piece that sat on her shelves. "Oh, you know what I mean, Little One. The teas at the supermarket, the ones in the colorful boxes that look like cereal boxes, the ones that—" He wrinkled his nose with distaste. "—that smell like soap and fresh fruit."

"They look like cereal boxes? You mean big boxes?"

"No, I mean they have drawings, cartoons and suchlike on them, pandas and pomegranates and _chinoiserie_—"

"Uncle Nessie, only you would dismiss a brand of tea because it has cartoon _chinoiserie_ on it. Here, this is plain green tea with just a drop of honey in it. Perfect for soothing your nerves and mine."

She set the tray down on the table in front of her couch. "Lemon cookies and ginger snaps," she said. "I made the lemon; my friend JJ made the ginger snaps."

Ernesto's smile widened. "Ah, already you're far more domestic than your mother has ever been."

She shrugged. She suspected the average banana slug had more domesticity in its makeup than Ambassador Prentiss did.

Ernesto crossed in front of the window with its decorative silk shade—

—and something exploded inward with a delicate tinkling, and Ernesto made a clumsy kind of quarter turn and said, "Oh, dear," and stumbled into the nearest chair.

Emily threw herself against him, brushing away a thousand diamondlike shards of window glass, mentally kicking herself for seeing to the tea before she got her extra weapon out of the safe.

"Stay down," she ordered the old man. "Are you badly hurt? Can you tell?"

She scampered around the chair, staying out of line of sight of the window, and hit the wall switch for the light, then crawled several feet to her left and turned the switch for the table lamp. A pale gray light filtered through the shredded silk shade, enabling her to see where everything was located.

"Speak to me, Ernesto," she said sharply. "How are you?"

"More surprised than wounded, I think," the diplomat replied weakly. "My right shoulder, and my right arm isn't—isn't fully cooperating. No pain yet, but experience suggests there will be some soon enough."

She scrambled across the floor on hands and knees and exposed the door of her safe. "I'll call 9-1-1 in just a minute, Nessie," she told him as she opened the door. "First I have to—"

"Of course, Little One," Ernesto said calmly. "It's the way of your profession. I take it that you were the likely target?"

She brought out a gun she hadn't touched in six years, other than to clean it and put it away, unwrapped it, checked its action, and grabbed a handful of magazines and a box of .45 ACP rounds. "Anything's possible," she replied when she was satisfied that the weapon was ready for use, "but I'm more likely to be the target at this moment."

"I heard no shot," Ernesto said, his voice gaining strength, rather than losing it. "Was that because the sound of the shattering glass masked it, or was that a silenced weapon?"

Still sitting on the floor, Prentiss turned and studied the diplomat. His dark gray suit shone a darker gray at the top of his right shoulder in the faint light from the window.

"Silenced, I think," she said. It annoyed her that she wasn't sure.

_How could I have missed that?_

**~ o ~**

**6:57 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

She'd cracked her way into the database where the case against her team, her family, was stored, and Spencer Reid and a surprisingly focused and intelligent Erin Strauss were on a pair of Julian's laptops and manning a couple throwaway cell phones, chasing down leads and making connections. It was sort of an elegant Conspiracy Central, she decided. She could learn to like this kind of atmosphere.

Reid's college buddy pursued his own investigations that might or might not be related to theirs. For all she knew, it could be State Department stuff, completely unrelated to what she and Reid and Strauss were working on. From time to time he stalked through the room but usually all that happened was that he refreshed someone's coffee or tea or offered something to eat.

_No wonder people used to call 'em "cookie pushers." _

"Which protocol do I use to track this bastard's IP address?" Strauss said. She still wore the skin-tight tiger-striped capris, but she now wore one of Julian Birdwell's sweatshirts over her halter top. She'd turned out to be way more comfortable with computers than Reid was, and she had great hunter-killer instincts once she was set loose on a target.

"The one at the top of the sheet," Penelope reminded her. "Just change the second line of code to match the—"

"Got it," Strauss snapped, not because she was cranky or impatient, but because she was focused on her task.

_I could get to like this woman_, Garcia realized with a secret smile.

Birdwell's phone sounded while he was on his next prowl through the work area. He must have known who was on the line because he didn't speak a word of English. It sounded like Italian, which was funny, because she thought of Italian as an excited-sounding language, but this sounded more like, oh, maybe funeral arrangements—slow and serious and deadly calm.

Birdwell walked away from them while he was still on his call, which enabled Penelope to put that last little bit of concentration into her task that enabled her to crack through a wall. "I'm in," she announced to her teammates.

"In where?"

"No idea," she said as she confronted what seemed to be a blog entry. "I thought I was on the trail of the people who did something with—OK, the ATM camera coverage of Morgan and Prentiss and you," she said to Reid, "it's all been altered, the time-stamps, I mean. And I'm sort of on the trail of whoever did the alterations, but it's like it's in _code_. And not like lines of computer code. I mean, like, Pig Latin or something."

"Pig Latin?" Strauss repeated.

"Something like that. I mean, 'pickershit.' Or something like that."

"Ladies and Spencer," Birdwell interrupted, his voice still calm and even, "someone just tried to take a shot at Emily. She's all right, but a mutual friend of ours, or Emily's and mine, was hit. Everything's under control, just thought you should know that—"

He stopped dead behind Garcia's shoulder. "Albanians?" He leaned forward and pointed. "You're dealing with Albanians? Click there," he directed.

"You mean where it says, um, _Hap nez lollygary_ something?"

"Closer to—" He said something that sounded nothing like _hap nez_ anything. "Go ahead, click it."

**~ o ~**

**7:02 PM**

**David Rossi**

He was still dusting away the crumbs of his carryout dinner—on Victor Wozniak's dime—when the interrogator himself burst into the room.

"Come on, kids, we're going for a ride," he announced.

Rossi looked up with interest, and that interest increased fifty-fold when he realized that Aaron Hotchner was right behind him, shoes, jacket and tie in place, and carrying bulky manila envelopes like the ones Rossi's and his belongings had been stashed in.

"Where?" Rossi said, immediately energized. "Why?"

Wozniak bent to collect his briefcase—without even bothering to check and see whether Dave has messed with it in his absence—and said, "Keep asking questions and there'll be no ice cream on the way home."

Rossi looked at Hotchner. "Where are we going?" he said, but they were moving rapidly and he was right behind them.

"No idea," Aaron replied, entirely too calm for Rossi's peace of mind, "but there are Albanians on the other end of it."


	15. All Together Now

I own nothing, yada yada. This is the end. An Epilogue follows shortly. Thank you, as always, Esperanta, for making me look so good!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Fifteen**

**All Together Now**

**7:09 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

"Just drop me here," he told Norma. "I can't thank you enough for everything you've done." He checked the slide on the automatic she'd brought him one more time. "I'll get this back to you."

"I thought you stored your truck over on—"

"I do," he said. "They'll have given up trying to follow us, but they may well be watching my house and my truck."

"Be careful."

He planted a kiss on her cheek. "I promise," he said, and leaped out of her sedan. He took a moment to seat the pistol properly in his holster—he'd given the Ethics and Internal Affairs dudes his gun but not that—and headed off at an oblique angle, toward the bodega on the corner.

Plenty of people were in the street, most of them looking fairly innocent. They probably were; he was still three blocks from Art's house, where he stored the construction truck. Whoever was pursuing them might have deep pockets, but not deep enough to cover a nine-to-sixteen-block area around every target.

He popped into the bodega, greeted the owner by name, and bought himself a disposable cell phone and a local soccer team's souvenir T-shirt and ball cap. He ducked into the storeroom of the bodega, where he lost his sports jacket and covered his brown work tee with the blue tie-dyed soccer shirt, and put on the hat. It wouldn't fool a close inspection, but it would fool a casual one, and he'd take his victories where he could. He left by the back door, still heading at an angle through the alleyway.

Nobody visible in the dimness of the alley, which was poorly lit. He stopped between two Dumpsters to activate the phone, then called the number Penelope had given him.

"Brandy Mae Stubbs," an eerily familiar female voice said. "What's your beef, turkey?"

"Morgan," he said, fighting an urge to grin. "This is my current number," and read it off for her. "Armed and two blocks from my truck. What's the latest?"

"Prentiss needs a pickup, she's armed and on the run."

"Give me a number or a location and I'm on it."

Erin "Brandy Mae" Strauss gave him an address, a coffee shop in Georgetown.

"Give me fifteen minutes, plus or minus," he told her. "Over twenty and I've been made." He hung up and strolled at a maddeningly casual pace for another block, then dodged smoothly between two townhouses.

If anyone was watching him, it was from inside one of the buildings. It was pretty unlikely whoever was doing this had that kind of juice.

He climbed on top of a fairly sturdy-looking trash can and hiked himself up onto the roof of one of the unattached garages of the properties behind the townhouses. From that vantage point, squatting low, he was finally able to make the people surveilling his pickup. There were two of them, rank amateurs in a black Toyota that was parked facing west the next street over, watching the front of Art's house. Worse, one was in the car, and one was outside it, prowling up and down the street.

_Dumb. Unimaginative._

_I like that in an opponent._

Morgan took a running jump to the next garage and lowered himself down between the two buildings. When he got to the one that held his own truck, he let himself in through the side window, then carefully and quietly raised the door.

He climbed into the truck, started the engine, backed out into the street and headed east.

_Oh, good luck getting your asses turned around soon enough to follow me…._

As he peeled around the next corner, he saw the outside guy still sprinting for the stake-out car.

_Amateurs. Gotta love 'em._

**~ o ~**

**7:10 PM**

**David Rossi**

"I still don't get it," Dave said as Aaron hustled him into the back seat of Victor Wozniak's geriatric personal Volvo station wagon. Wozniak pitched a heavy gym bag in after Rossi and ducked around to get behind the wheel.

"Just get the hell in," Aaron commanded. "I promise I'll answer all your questions as soon as we're on the road."

"Most of them," Wozniak growled.

"Most of them," Aaron agreed. "A lot of them."

Rossi pushed the gym bag away from him—it seemed to weigh a ton—and yanked a pair of pastel My Little Ponies out from under his butt. "You're a _Brony_?" he gasped at the Justice Department interrogator.

"Hell, no—those belong to my granddaughter," Wozniak snapped.

"Oh, cute," Rossi said. "How old is she?"

"Eight. She's a serious collector, so don't frickin' mess with them." The engine started with a healthy, high-horsepower roar, and Wozniak tore out of the parking lot at an alarming rate of speed.

"I thought that collectors liked them in their original packaging."

"Collectors'll take the rare ones any way they can," Wozniak shot back as he slapped a red revolving light on his dash. "You want to get up to speed on the sitch, or you want to talk about toys?"

Rossi belatedly realized he would need his seat belt fastened. "Situation," he called over the roar of the engine.

"OK," Wozniak roared back, "we got us an imbedded source with the Albanians, passing along their next few moves to us."

"Justice does undercover work with Albanians?"

Wozniak made an frighteningly sharp and rapid turn, sending Rossi bouncing to the opposite side of the back seat, the still-unconnected seatbelt tab still in his fingers. "Tell him, Perp," he barked.

"Reduced to its essentials," Aaron bellowed at him, "Garcia's hacked the Albanians' mobiles and Julian's translating everything for her. Get the vests out, Dave."

"He prefers to be called 'SSA Rossi,'" Wozniak said.

"Yeah, and I'd prefer to have my feet up, enjoying a scotch and the Smithsonian channel. Life sucks," Hotchner said. "The vests, please."

Rossi unzipped the gym bag to display several Kevlar vests. Of the first three, two were marked ATF and one was marked DEA. Before he could comment on them, Hotchner said, "Emergency situation. We took whatever we could get."

Seeing a straight patch of road, Rossi took a few seconds to fasten his seatbelt. "There are five in here!" he called. One said FBI, the other was yet another BATF vest.

"We're picking up Prentiss and Morgan on the way," Hotchner said. "You ready to hear more of the story now, or would you rather complain?"

**~ o ~**

**7:14 PM**

**Spencer Reid**

The sun was setting over the Potomac.

He was in his element, a supersweet coffee in one hand, a dry-erase marker in the other, and a brace of maps slapped up against the opposite side of one of Julian's transparent boards. In the background, he heard Julian and Penelope listening in as the brain trust of the Albanian mob obligingly (and unwittingly) told them everything they were doing. Erin Strauss, whom he suspected he would love forever and ever, functioned as the switchboard and clearing house for what the Good Guys were doing.

And Spencer, still dressed as Ricky Lee Butts, tracked everyone's positions on the transparent board, jiggling absently to Funkytown, currently playing softly on his iPod Shuffle.

"Hyserjon's on Fourteenth Southwest," Julian announced. "Meeting whatsisname Goxhaj in the Pizza Hut parking lot in fifteen minutes."

Reid rubbed out the **Hy** in a circle and moved it half an inch closer to the **Gx** circle, then drew dotted lines from both of them to the intersection where the Pizza Hut could be found.

"Someone named Florian's on three," Erin announced. "He says he knows you from Kennedy Center?"

"I'll get it," Julian said.

He'd known Julian now for fourteen years, knew all his strengths and weaknesses; had seen him helping out at his dad's poultry farm in Tennessee and being gentle and attentive to Diana Reid at the Bennington Sanitarium. He'd seen video of Julian at White House functions and in nothing but a leather harness, but this was the first time that their professional lives had intersected.

This was kind of fun.

"Yeah, yeah," he was saying. "We know, absolutely, that the Albanian government has nothing whatsoever to do with—" He listened for a minute, then said, "What?" then added a stream of what was apparently Albanian. As he drifted by, he pried the coffee from Spencer's fingers and took a long drink of it, rolled his eyes, silently mouthed _Thank you_ and handed it back.

Spencer elaborately wiped off the lip of the cup with Ricky Lee's shirt, making sure that Julian was watching as he did it.

Birdwell just rolled his eyes again. When he was through with his call, he raised his voice. "Hey, the Albanian Mob out of Tirana wishes to disassociate itself officially from this disaster in the making," he announced. "Actually, 'disaster' fails to convey adequately the obscenity and contempt they're using to describe this mess."

"So we know yet exactly what the problem was?" Erin asked.

"Ditmar and Juxhin Sallaj," Spencer replied. "A couple guys doing a little fishing, a little bit of lobstering, and a little child molesting along the southern coast of Maine."

"Maine. The Wallingford thing?" Erin didn't miss much.

"Exactly. The sad and sick thing is that if they hadn't picked on the grandson of a war hero, they might have kept it up a little longer. But they did, and they panicked and started killing their victims, and we came down on them hard."

"But _their_ grandfather's big in the Albanian Mob," Garcia added. "That Zimeraj guy. And he decided it was up to him to make sure that none of his blood did any time in the U.S. So he eliminated the Moyers and tried to set up Hotch and Rossi as dirty, not deserving of a jury's attention."

"And whether he originally had official sanction for this operation or not," Reid continued, "as soon as his set-up started to go south, it figured that the Powers That Be would bail on him."

Julian beamed. "And it went south because you and Brandy—" He winked at Erin. "—managed to escape getting busted?"

"We were only part of it," Reid explained. "Emily saw something hinky in the documentation. Morgan could prove that the ATM tapes were tampered with. Hotch got everyone solid legal representation from the beginning. Rossi got somebody looking at the fingerprints on some other documents. Zimeraj's going ballistic now because his perfect scheme has sprung as many holes as a—as a—"

"Lace bra," Erin concluded forcefully. "And none of us could have come as far as we did without Penelope's genius for hacks, both legal and—ah, interesting." She nodded at Garcia, then touched her headset. "And the crazy guy from Justice just connected with Morgan and Prentiss, they're heading for Pizza Hut."

**~ o ~**

**7:23 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

In the passenger seat of Morgan's pickup truck, Emily finally used her own cell phone.

"Confection!" Ernesto Cavallieri said happily. "Are you taking care of truth and justice and all?"

"I am," she said with a smile. "But how are _you_?"

"Pfft. It's nothing. Well, it's _something_, and I will expect you to wait on me and hover over me and bake me nice things and tell me all the gossip at your BAU. But for now, I'm so full of morphine that I can be wonderfully brave. What can Rico and I do for you?"

Rico? Right, his limo-driver-cum-bodyguard.

"Wait, you're with Rico? Where are you? Didn't you go to the emergency room?"

"Of course not. As long as the injury is reported, I'm clear, little one. I went to my personal doctor and he has sewn me up and pumped me full of legal happiness. But Rico's very angry and he's getting—hormonal. He needs to hit something, little one. At which target may I aim him?"

Prentiss glanced up. "Next right," she told Morgan. "Hang on, Nessie, I'll—wait, I know. I'm sending you an address. If you can, send Rico over there to tell the management that it might be wise to clear the store and the parking lot—and call the police."

"But nothing Rico can punch or shoot himself?"

"I'm sorry, Uncle. Perhaps another time."

She rang off the call.

"So," she said to Morgan, "who's in the Volvo with the _I-heart-my-Shih-Tzu_ bumper sticker?"

"A scary-ass interrogator," Morgan said. "Enormous, looks like a seven-foot blowup doll of Abe Vigoda and sounds like a mile of broken glass."

"I saw him at the jail!" said Emily. "He said that since Hotch was busy being lovey with me he'd talk to Rossi. Rossi didn't look happy about it, but Hotch didn't seem concerned."

"Hotch spent hours with the guy. He _likes_ him. They were singing."

"That's weird."

"It's twisted is what it was," said Morgan.

Emily thought back fondly over some of her more—interesting—moments with Julian Birdwell and decided that what Morgan didn't know about twisted couldn't hurt him.

A call came in to Morgan's throwaway, and Emily took it. "Prentiss," she said.

"We're five minutes away," Aaron Hotchner told her. "We have vests and extra weapons if anyone needs one."

"We're OK on weaponry," Emily told him. "The vests are a nice touch, though. I have a guy going to warn the management that something might be coming down. He'll have them call the police."

"Oh, hell, we don't need Metro cops taking fire on this—"

"I think Rico can handle this," she assured him. "He was Interpol for twenty years. How far away are our targets?"

"I'm using Reid's codes on these: H-Y is four minutes away, G-X is five minutes but closing faster. Does Morgan have a light on that thing?"

Prentiss looked at Morgan, who shook his head.

"Nope," she said.

"All right, we have to get ahead of these guys, so Vic's gonna hit the siren. Turn on your flashers, use the horn, and ride right on our bumper."

"Will do," Emily said grimly, and passed on the word.

**~ o ~**

**7:27 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

In some ways, it was like being back in her techie den. She was bouncing from screen to screen, providing an ongoing flow of information and support to her Team, her family, out in the field.

In other ways, it could not have been more different. Never mind the physical location; just the fact that Reid and—_I'll never get used to this_—Erin Strauss were backing her up, and she had a translator at her elbow, bouncing effortlessly from Albanian to Georgian (a couple guys named Otar and Nikoloz had been hired to make an unnamed delivery) and back to English.

Because they didn't have the talk-around system available to them, it was cell phones only— so Reid was connected to Morgan and Prentiss and kept geographic track; Strauss spoke to Hotch and Rossi and negotiated with the Bureau; Julian the tame translator spoke to a couple guys from the State Department, Ernesto and Rico, who'd somehow become involved. Garcia functioned as Mission Central.

"White Subaru Forester in sight of Volvo," Erin Strauss, at her left at the table, announced, and read off the license number. (For simplicity's sake, the three units in the field were _Volvo_, _Truck_, and _Limo_.)

Garcia tapped a couple keys. "That's Otar," she said.

Off to her right, Reid marked on the blown-up map of the Pizza Hut area he'd hand-drawn on the transparent board. He had two colors of dry-erase marker held in his teeth. He still held his coffee mug; apparently Genius Boy had yet to figure out that with a mouth full of markers he wasn't going to be drinking any coffee any time soon.

Julian's other-other phone—he seemed to have a lot of them—rang and he muttered English at someone.

Reid pulled the markers out of his mouth long enough to announce, "Volvo brought vests for Prentiss and Morgan but they haven't collected them yet."

"Volvo's a busy boy," Garcia said. She wished she knew anything about Wozniak other than the stuff she was able to pick up officially, which was that he was a very scary dude in his mid-fifties, six-foot-seven, ex-DIA, and reputedly the terror of Gitmo. For that matter, _Limo_ was a completely unknown quantity.

Her own phone rang.

"Garcia," Aaron Hotchner's voice said.

"Hey," she replied. "Thought you were working through Strauss."

"Different strand of communications," Hotch told her. "I have some documentation here—"

Of course, it was the Unit Chief's job to ensure that everything was legal, that all the T's were crossed and the I's dotted. A legally shaky operation—and some aspects of their operation were pretty shaky indeed—might nail the bad guys, but it wouldn't put them away.

Nevertheless….

_You're in a speeding car on your way to a shoot-out, all testosterone city, and you're calmly dictating warrants to me. I will never understand the way your mind works._

"Morgan sideswiped the Forester," Spencer Reid called out, in the heat of conflict suddenly oblivious to code designations. "He and Emily are taking fire." A tense moment, and he added, "No more fire coming from the Forester."

"Volvo T-boned the Forester," Strauss told the little group, delight evident in her voice.

"D.C. Metro's all over Goxhaj," Julian said. "No warrants necessary, caught in the act of committing a crime."

"Morg—_Truck_—is in pursuit of Hyserjon," Reid said. He was down to black dry-erase in his right hand and phone in his left.

"Metro has Otar and Nikoloz," Julian added. "And a nice cache of assault weapons."

Garcia glanced up and noticed that Strauss was pacing back and forth, panther-like—well, given the stripes on her polyester capris, maybe tiger-like—as pumped as anyone else in the room. Even Birdwell's voice kept inching up the excitement scale.

Suddenly, Aaron Hotchner laughed in Garcia's left ear. "Love it. SWAT has arrived. Garcia, we're at stand-down."

Penelope raised her voice. "Hotch says stand down."

The word was passed to Morgan and Prentiss, to Rico the limo driver.

_Yes_, Garcia thought, happily chasing down those last little details.

_This is what happens when you try to arrest us. We kick your butts and we _still_ get the bad guys._


	16. Monday Night, Kaleidoscope

A/N: Oops, Epilogue will arrive in three parts.

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Sixteen**

**Epilogue Part I**

**Monday Night, Kaleidoscope**

**7:31 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner **

_Get a grip._

Wearing a DEA ballistic vest and clutching his phone like a freaking lifeline, Hotch leaned against one of those old fashioned signal boxes for the traffic lights at that intersection. He tried to block the lunacy around him and concentrated on putting one legal foot in front of another for Garcia. This was so iffy, this whole situation. He couldn't shake the fear that no matter what he said or did, he'd just make it worse.

"Forget it, Perp," Wozniak growled from behind him, and clapped him on the shoulder.

"Warrants," he replied. "Got to try to cover our butts on this—"

"Nah, I got your back on this one; given my specialties, I get something of a free pass on confidential informants," the enormous interrogator informed him. "We'll take care of all the warrants and shit, gin it up with DHS and everything'll be _smooth, just like buttah_."

Aaron studied the man. "You're sure?" He wasn't sure why he was asking. So far Wozniak had been pretty much as advertised: scary and competent and straight-up.

"Guaran-damn-tee it, Perp." Wozniak hiked his trousers and headed off at an oblique angle to confer with someone, Lord alone knew who.

For the first time since his arrest, all the tension drained from his body. "Forget it, Garcia," he sighed into his cell. "Justice has this clusterf—ah, situation in its hands and on its head."

Penelope giggled in his ear. "Glad to hear it, sir. Does that mean you're going home?"

"That's a good question. Hey, Vic!" When Wozniak turned, he said, "Am I still in custody, or what?"

Wozniak sketched a priestly cross in the air. "Go thou and sin no more," he intoned. "We'll get you back your creds and sidearm as soon as, you know, the molasses in January gets its act together."

Hardly daring hope for an affirmative, Aaron asked, "So I'm all done here? I can go home?"

"Go, Perp. Your continued presence here just complicates a setup that's already pretty damn Byzantine. I mean it. You, your people, your people's people. All the random wackos you and yours brought to the party. GTFU, like the kids say."

"Garcia?" Aaron said into the phone.

"I heard, sir," Penelope purred at him. "Congratulations. But—sir?"

"Yeah?"

"Why is he calling you 'Burp'?"

"Long story, Garcia. Talk to you soon."

**~ o ~**

**7:36 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

He actually hiked himself up and sat on the roof of his poor dead truck with its crumpled left front and its assortment of bullet holes, sat there looking over the broad expanse of flashing red, white, and blue lights illuminating all kinds of official and civilian vehicles, from SUVs to family cars to a limousine to a pair of SWAT trucks. Even knowing who the players were, he was hard-pressed to figure out who was doing what, and to whom, in that sea of confusion.

Scene looked like something out of _Grand Theft Pizza Hut_.

The truck sagged a little as Emily Prentiss climbed up on the passenger side and sat beside him, her boots bracing against his starred and spider-webbed windshield.

"Hotch says it's all under control," she said. She didn't sound convinced.

"Man, I don't see anything under control here," Morgan admitted. "It's madness."

"Rico—he's the limo driver, OK?—he says there's a Sicilian phrase for it that translates, more or less, to 'making love to an incontinent goat.'"

After grimacing and thinking about that image for a few seconds, Derek said, "I don't get that one at all, Princess. It's disgusting and pointless and nonsensical and probably illegal and—"

He stopped dead.

"The penny drops," she said.

He looked out over the scene. "Yeah, it does. But don't expect me to thank you for putting that picture in my head."

"No thanks needed. I live to serve. Ow." The heel of Prentiss's left boot had penetrated the cracked glass of the windshield. She yanked her foot free and looked for a less damaged bit to rest her feet on. "Will your insurance cover this?"

"I hope so. If it doesn't, I'll sic Norma on the company."

"Norma?"

"The lawyer Hotch set me up with." He grinned. "Sharp little lady, sprung me from the Zoo and lent me a gun."

The expression on Emily's face was wonderful. "Your _lawyer_?"

"That's just between us, Princess. She thought—accurately, not that it was rocket science—that someone was out to get me, so when she bounced me out of holding, she gave me this." He patted the elderly M-1911 fondly. "Doesn't sit right in my holster, but shoots just fine—oh, crap," he finished. "And when they analyze the rounds—"

"If they even bother to, since apparently nobody's dead—"

"Worst case, if they get all OCD on us and try to account for every round, I don't know if Norma has clear title to this puppy. Might be a throwdown she came by and never bothered to register or anything."

"Then I guess you'll have to tell 'em you weren't armed," Emily said.

"Oh, man, I hate to lie around Hotch, and factor that goddamn Wozniak dude into it and I _really_ don't want to lie."

"Then cross your fingers and hope they don't go all OCD."

"Yeah." Morgan shook his head. "You know, you're right. It's like—is that really a Sicilian saying? The incontinent goat thing?"

She shrugged. "Rico says so."

"Which one is he, anyway?"

She craned her head for about half a minute, surveying the scene, then said. "Over there. Little guy in the gray uniform."

_Little guy_ was dead accurate; he couldn't be more than five-two, five-three, and maybe one-fifteen soaking wet, with close-trimmed silver hair and a matching beard. He looked like an elderly chimp in a suit.

"Wait, he's a _bodyguard_? For what? Gerbils?"

She nudged him. "Don't underestimate him. But he might have made up the thing about the incontinent goats. It's one of his many charms."

**~ o ~**

**7:46 PM**

**David Rossi**

"Excuse me? Agent Rossi?" an unfamiliar male voice called. Dave turned from where he was folding his Kevlar vest so he could leave it in Wozniak's gym bag. A distinguished-looking man in a well-tailored suit, his left arm in a gray silk sling, beamed at him. "_Buona sera,_ Agent Rossi! _Son' Ernesto Cavallieri. Poss' aiutarti?_"

He certainly looked harmless enough, and he _had_ just asked whether he could help.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Cavallieri," Dave replied, refusing to get sucked into speaking Italian, just in case he needed someone around him to serve as a witness eventually. He wasn't that paranoid as a rule, but so far, this day had been—spectacularly unusual.

"I'm Agent Prentiss's godfather," Cavallieri continued with a smile, his English only faintly accented. He nodded toward the long black Mercedes limousine. "That's my car and driver. I'm providing Emily with a ride back to her apartment. Can I take you anywhere?"

Rossi glanced around himself automatically. "What about Morgan and Hotchner?"

"Ah, Agent Derek Morgan's lawyer is coming to get him. I believe some member of Agent Hotchner's family is picking him up. Shall I double-check?"

He shook his head. There was no way Emily would abandon team members if she had access to a car and she knew that they needed a ride. Rossi sketched a wave at Hotch, at Wozniak, at Morgan, and when the little guy in his uniform popped out to open the door, he climbed into the back of the limo.

Emily looked fantastic, something scarlet and exceptionally tight on her upper body, black pinstriped slacks, and nasty-ass Doc Marten Diva boots. "You're looking good," she said to Dave with a grin. "Well, except for the ball and chain and the sick prison pallor."

"I'm hurt," he said. "You coulda been _my_ hootchy-mama. Why'd you say you belonged to Aaron? I woulda done a performance as groom-to-be that woulda scorched the bars and broken the hearts of everyone within fifty yards."

Those dark take-no-crap eyes studied him for a few seconds. "Granted," she said at last, "you have more experience at playing the whole fiance thing than all the rest of us together—"

"Oh, that's so unfair, Emily—"

"And so true." She turned to their host. "He's had three wives, Uncle Nessie," she said. "Can you imagine?"

"One at a time, of course," Rossi hastened to add.

Cavallieri regarded him coldly. "Such a disappointment. Anyone can marry one at a time. To marry three at a time, that requires—"

"Contempt for law and propriety," said Rossi.

"I was thinking more of—ah, how best to express it." The old man bit his lip and pondered it for a bit. "Ah, 'suicidal stupidity' sums it up elegantly." He nudged Dave. "And balls, of course. Brass balls." 

"Uncle Nessie's balls are pretty brassy, too," Emily said. "Our Albanian friends—or somebody in their pay—shot him at my place not two hours ago—"

"It's my boobies," Cavallieri said with a one-shoulder shrug. Actually, that was the only point where his Italian accent peeked out at all: _It's-a my boobies_. "In silhouette, I look very much like little Emily."

"And he should have gone to the hospital, but no, he has to show off his brassies—"

"I left Marlena at your apartment," the old man scolded back. "She's to stay until your glass is repaired." 

His driver said something in rapid, coarse Sicilian that Rossi had to think about and actively work at translating. "Wait a minute," he said. "He wanted to watch them with _what_ kind of goat?" He roared with delight. "I haven't heard that expression since I was a snotnosed kid!"

**~ o ~**

**8:22 PM**

**Spencer Reid**

The first new bit of down-the-rabbit-hole appeared when he tried to make arrangements to pick up his Volvo out at Quantico.

"I'm sorry," he said to his contact at the Bureau. "I'm going to put you on speaker. Would you repeat that, please?"

"It's like this, Mr. Reid," the career bureaucrat said, clearing her throat and raising her voice, as though addressing a crowd. She seemed incapable of addressing him as either _Agent_ or _Doctor_. She was in her own little world, her own little reality. "While you aren't currently in custody, and the original warrant for your arrest in the corruption case has been voided, the warrant charging you with interstate flight to avoid prosecution has not."

"Interstate flight?"

"You deny that you left Virginia?"

_Oh, for crying in the night…._

"So, you're telling me—" he prompted, enjoying the stunned looks on the faces of Penelope, Erin Strauss, and Julian.

"We're not prepared to come looking for you, under the circumstances, but if you set foot on Federal property, we're required to arrest you. It isn't something we have a lot of leeway on."

Erin just sat there, a baffled and disgusted look on her face. Penelope looked at Julian and did this strange thing, wiggling her fingers, gesturing as though her hand were a creature crawling across her eyes from right to left, which made Julian grimace, fighting not to laugh out loud, and giving her a jubilant thumbs-up.

"Furthermore," the bureaucrat continued, "the search warrants for your vehicles haven't yet been vacated. I don't have them listed in impound, so—I'm not even sure where you would go to collect it, even if you weren't, you know. A wanted man." She said this without the slightest trace of irony.

"This is Section Chief Erin Strauss," the former Brandy Mae said at Reid's phone in her most official, most commanding tones. "Is there also a search warrant for my vehicle?"

"Um, your employee number?"

"Oh, really! Who is this?" Strauss blazed.

"Carlie Sue Stuart," the bureaucrat replied smoothly. "I'm just trying to help you in the most efficient way I can. Your employee number?"

Reid and Strauss exchanged crossed-eyes looks, and she recited the requested information.

"Thank you, ma'am," Ms. Stuart said. "There's no warrant on your vehicle, but we do have an outstanding warrant on you for aiding and abetting Mr. Reid's flight." 

"Well, thank God," Strauss snapped. "At least you got that part right. Thank you. And now, if you please, if you'd be so kind as to give me your own employee ID number, Ms. Stuart?"

There was a brief hesitation, and the bureaucrat replied with her ID, and added, "I'm sorry if you find this difficult, Ms. Strauss—"

"Not so much difficult as stupefyingly illogical—"

"Ma'am, this is the department of grounds and resources, not the department of logic—"

"Outstanding!" Strauss said, her voice bright and enthusiastic. "And could you please transfer us to the department of logic, Ms. Stuart?"

"Um, ah, the Bureau has no Department of Logic, ma'am—"

"I rather thought not. Thank you, dear. You have a good night now." Strauss waved an airy hand. "Feel free to hang up any old time, Spencer, dear," she said.

Reid beamed.

_I like this woman more every minute. _


	17. Try for Bright n Early, Settle for Early

A/N: As always, I'm making no money off this and getting precious little respect, LOL. Second part of the three-part Epilogue. Thanks to Esperanta, who always makes me look better than I am. You rock, girlie!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Seventeen**

**Epilogue Part Two, Tuesday**

**Try for Bright and Early, Settle for Early**

**5:52 AM**

**Emily Prentiss**

She lay there for a few seconds wondering how she'd managed to sleep through her alarm, then the previous day played out in her memory like, like—one of those surrealist films Reid liked to drag her to. As she gazed up at her ceiling, she recalled being arrested by that Yates bitch, to start with. Just thinking about the woman's nerve made her toss her head, and, _ow_, such a bad idea….

Hung over?

She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated.

The Federal Building. Sarah, the lawyer Hotch had sent her. Siccing Julian on the jerks who wanted access to the contents of her safe.

Hotch and Rossi and Morgan in their little pretend jail.

Uncle Nessie bailing her out.

_Nessie._

She recalled one window along her her living room wall exploding inward, shredding her art deco silk shade, sending Ernesto spinning silently, a look of surprise on his kindly face—and later, that same kindly face, raising toast after toast in that same living room.

She stood up carefully, unsteadily.

_I'm fully dressed. I crashed without even taking off my boots?_

Her head throbbed; her stomach lurched.

There's a cure for this. Kitchen. Aspirin. Ginger ale. Tabasco.

_One step. Another._

_You can do this, girl._

**~ o ~**

**5:54 AM**

**Aaron Hotchner **

Something small and determined landed against him, tiny fingers drilling into his arm, his neck, his shoulder. "Dad-_deeeee_," a soft and frightened voice confided, "Giant on the floor."

"Mm?"

"Mr. Morgan on the sofa, Dad-_deee_. And a _giant_ on the floor. And he gots _underwear_ on!"

He tousled his son's hair before prying the boy's fingers loose from his muscles. "That's a good thing," he told the child. "We'd never let a giant in without underwear."

He didn't look at Jack's face. He didn't need to. The kid wouldn't buy it for a minute.

_What the hell happened last night?_

He dimly remembered Wozniak calling him, telling him—oh, something.

When his work cell phone went off on the night stand, he'd awakened. His brain might know that he was still suspended, but his nervous system, a far more primitive piece of wiring, had sent him lunging for the mobile before he was even fully aware he was moving.

"Hotchner," he'd mumbled, falling back into the pillows.

"Problem," that huge sonofabitching interrogator had growled. "There's still Albanians in the wind. Can I park Agent Morgan at your place?"

He'd mulled those two phrases for a second or two, trying to make sense out of them.

_Oh. Right._

Sure, he'd mumbled at last. When you get here, call me, don't ring; I don't want to wake Jack.

He recalled swinging his legs out of bed and sitting there, feet on the floor, head in his hands, and teeth gritted. All the _pissed-off_ that he'd sublimated all day, that he'd hidden behind the professional mask and encouraging smiles and nods for the Team, had just erupted like Old Faithful, washing over him and bathing him in an almost painful drive to punch something or someone, hard and repeatedly. That memory was pretty vivid.

Now, he lay there clinging to his son, trying to remember when—and why—they'd decided that Wozniak should also spend the night.

"You want breakfast?" he mumbled at the boy.

"Pop-Tarts," the boy mumbled back against his neck. "Cherry ones."

He tried to recall what was and wasn't in the cupboard. "Strawberry OK?"

"Nuh-uh."

**~ o ~**

**5:56 AM**

**Penelope Garcia**

Her bladder decided that this was as good a time as ever to get up and take care of business. She sat up. Heard Kevin mumble something sleepily. She purred, "Shh, just go back to sleep, sweetheart." She made little kissy sounds toward him. Tucked her feet into her faux-fur Wile E. Coyote slippers.

Recalled that Kevin was in Arizona with White Collar Crime.

Slowly, so as not to rouse the (thank God!) still-gently snoring Erin Strauss, she tiptoed down the hall to the closed door of the bathroom.

Right, when they'd returned her to her apartment, they'd discovered a couple problems.

"Son of a bitch," Erin had blazed. "Spence, honey, wasn't the Buick right there?"

_Never mind the weirdness of the whole "Spence, honey" thing._

Reid, Penelope, and Julian, who had driven them back to Georgetown, had stared in dismay at the section of curb, a section now completely devoid of any motor vehicles, probably because of the fireplug and the No Parking signs. Reid's ancient Rustbucket Rentals Buick, it seemed, had been towed by the City.

Still sitting in the back seat of the Town Car, using the laptop Reid and Strauss had purchased for her and the wi-fi hub Julian supplied, Penelope had succeeded in confirming that the Buick was way the hell over in the freaking Blue Plains impound lot.

"Screw it," Julian had said. "I'll take you two home, and I'll pick you up in the morning to get your cars—and the Buick—whatever y'all need."

Garcia'd noticed that as Birdwell got tireder and more annoyed, his so-called goober accent had started to manifest itself. She also noticed that, consciously or not, Reid was mirroring it.

"Problem," Erin Strauss had said just then. "I have a text from Krystal, she says that there's a pair of government cars parked on our street, watching our house." She gave a short little barking laugh. "I imagine that's the _helped-a-fleeing-suspect_ bullshit rearing its ugly head again."

"In that case," said Julian, "there are probably teams at your place, too, Ricky Lee. Y'all can stay the night with me, if you want."

And Penelope hadn't known what to do, because on the one hand, Marvin was supposed to be at her apartment between seven and eight in the morning with her confiscated electronics, but on the other hand, she didn't want to spend the night alone.

After she expressed her dilemma, somehow they'd arrived at the decision that all four of them would spend the night at Garcia's—Erin sharing the queen-size with Penelope, and the guys sacking out on the couch and the futon.

Now, as she wobbled sleepily down the hall, she heard the toilet flush.

Heard the sink run.

_OK, that for sure isn't Kevin; I can never get him to wash his hands after he uses the can._

The bathroom door opened and Spencer Reid, in tighty-whities, a floppy FBI Academy T-shirt, one blue-and-green striped sock and a black sock with dancing dinosaurs, or possibly lizards, waved to her uncertainly as an expression of chagrin crossed his face. He ducked back in and she heard the unmistakable sound of a seat being lowered.

_Don't tell me men can't be trained._

**~ o ~**

**5:57 AM**

**Emily Prentiss **

OK, the only problem with wobbling carefully from her bedroom to the kitchen was that she had to cross the living room. The living room was dark, with only just the beginnings of light starting to filter through her new window, the one not yet covered with a shade—and yet she could discern two forms in the dimness.

The place reeked of pipe and cigar smoke, of ranch dip and cheesy popcorn. Of red wines and scotch. Of Ernesto's cologne and the mousse David Rossi used in his hair, and the medicinal minty nip of Ben-Gay that Rico obsessively slathered on his joints.

She groped for the switch for a three-way table lamp, clicking it to its lowest setting.

"Good morning, little confection," Uncle Nessie said. He lay on the sofa, pillows bracing his injured left shoulder. Like Emily, he was fully dressed, although he'd removed his shoes. "Is it time for you to wake up already?"

"Hm-mm," said a drowsy David Rossi. He lay on the floor, his upper body protected by the cushion from her armchair. He, too, was fully dressed, although he had removed his jacket and his shoes. "We're on the only stand-down that really means jack shit. Go back to sleep, Prentiss."

Right.

She had invited Ernesto and David up for a drink when they dropped her off. Dave Rossi had downed three scotches in rapid succession.

"Never have the luxury of doing this," he'd confided to Ernesto as he poured himself a fourth. "Even when they say you're free, they won't call you, you can't afford to get wasted. If some beachcomber falls over a body dump, _voila_, suddenly that forty-eight hour stand-down is just gone—_poof_—like, like—" His brow had furrowed as he'd searched for a decent simile. "Like cotton candy in the rain. You know? It's fluffy and pink and gorgeous one minute, then you lick it or you spill your soda pop on it and it's this tiny, hard, unforgiving little blob." Rossi'd tossed back his fourth shot. "And that's what I liked about retirement: the freedom to drink myself stupid every once in a while without worrying that I was putting somebody at risk." He hoisted his empty shot glass theatrically and cried, "So—here's to suspension, _mi numi!_"

Then Morgan had called her and reported that there were Albanian mob dudes still roaming all over his neighborhood and recommended that she take precautions.

Ernesto's immediate response was to announce that he was spending the night—which pretty much meant so was Dave. Not that that was a big question, since Rossi was already leaning to one side and telling some long, tangled anecdote about some Japanese friend who'd been unable to say "jelly glass" when he was drunk—except Rossi couldn't say it correctly either by then.

Ernesto had ordered Rico to secure the car—and what did that mean, after all? Secure it? Did he mean _lock it_? Booby-trap it?—and before you could say "jelly glass," assuming you could still say it, the diminutive bodyguard had joined the merry band in Emily's living room, calling out for veggie platters and calzones and something that might have been breaded calamari with hot sauce on the side.

"I need something from the kitchen," she told Ernesto and Rossi.

A small figure wearing nothing but boxers, silk socks, a gold religious medallion, and three—_three!_—handguns appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. "What can I get for you, Emily?" Rico asked. His whole wiry little body seemed to be covered with springy silver fur. "You want something for the head, maybe?"

_Just give it up. These guys have taken over your place. _

"Sure," she said, moving pillows so she could sit down in the living room. "And a cappuccino."

"Coming right up, peaches," the little man caroled contentedly.

"Jelly glass," she mumbled, just to make sure she could say it.

**~ o ~**

**5:59 AM**

**Derek Morgan**

He opened his eyes, failed to recognize the ceiling, and remembered that he was on Hotch's couch. He heard the Unit Chief in the kitchenette negotiating (without a whole lot of success) with a small terrorist demanding cherry Pop-Tarts.

_Do they even come in cherry? _Himself, he was strictly a brown-sugar-and-cinnamon kind of guy. OK, sometimes blueberry, especially if there was ice cream involved.

On the floor just beyond him, just barely visible in the light shed from the kitchenette, he saw Victor Wozniak's thick, enormous, furry right leg protruding from a bright top sheet decorated with the characters from _Cars_. Hotch had been kind of hard-pressed to come up with an extra set of grownup bed linens. Morgan himself was swathed in earth-tone monkeys, giraffes, and lions.

Right. The freaking Albanians and their inept surveillance of his townhouse. He'd had the words, "I need to borrow back your gun" on the tip of his tongue, but Norma had frowned and peered up and down the street—she was kind of cute when she frowned—and said, "I think the Feds are your friends on this one, Derek."

Oh, sure, he could have let himself get into a shootout with the damn fools, and if his life were an action flick—which it sometimes felt like—it would have made a great climax-just-beyond-the-climax, a "_just when you thought it was safe to go home_" kind of moment. But this was real life, and nobody in D.C. Metro—or the Bureau, for that matter—was likely to appreciate his going all _Death Wish_ or _Die Hard_ on these dudes' asses.

So—he'd sent Norma home and called the Feds.

Who'd shown up in force, helicopter and all. Derek had lounged against a light pole and been part of the audience, just watching it all go down. The best part? He was the only person on scene who hadn't had to spend the next two hours filing reports. Well, he and Victor Wozniak, who had materialized out of nowhere in a rented Subaru—the Volvo'd taken some damage when it T-boned the Georgians at the Pizza Hut shootout—and they'd decided, after a little consideration of their options, that Aaron Hotchner owed them a flop.

"_Told you_ we gots cherry!" a small voice crowed from the kitchen, to which Mr. Negotiation sighed something totally unprofessional, like _OK, fine, whatever._

"Is there coffee?" Wozniak rumbled from his nest of pillows and cushions on the floor.

"There can be," Hotch replied. "Keep it down, don't wake Morgan."

"Yeah," Derek said. "'Cause he'll only hold you up for blueberry Pop Tarts."

**~ o ~**

**6:02 AM**

**Spencer Reid**

He stretched fitfully and tried to go back to sleep, but he just didn't do that well in unfamiliar environments—other than hotel rooms, of course; he'd spent so many years on the road with the BAU that sometimes his own room felt more than a little bit foreign—but he'd frankly found the frilly little hot pink nightie Garcia was wearing, well, kind of erotic. And the idea of Garcia sharing a bed with Erin Strauss—_shit_. Awesomeness. He was a huge fan of girl-on-girl action, and, frankly, an older chick who knew how to take care of herself….

_Oh, stop it._

He could hear Julian over on his futon murmuring on his phone in some goddamn language to some goddamn State Department official or another. Lord alone knew what Julian really did at State. Reid figured he was probably CIA, NSA, something like that. He and Prentiss had formed a connection so fast and so firmly, that they had to have something scary-intense in common other than, the, um, the porn thing. Which made for a tight connection to start with, but even so.

He rolled over again.

Garcia was in the kitchen now, singing softly. No, singing softly with someone else.

_We are fam-i-ly,_

_I got all my sisters with meeee,_

_We are fam-i-ly,_

_Get up everybody and sing—_

Holy crap, Strauss wore another lacy little baby doll top, powder blue, and since she was a bit taller than Garcia, it broke just at the tops of her thighs…_ahh, Jesus, can you say MILF?_

_Everyone can see we're together  
As we walk on by  
And we fly just like birds of a feather  
I'm not telling no lie_—

They were doing the Bump.

_I'm freaking dying here, ladies! _


	18. The Word from Justice

A/N: Thanks for your patience while we finished "Solitary 5 Point 0." Usual disclaimers apply, not mine, only the situations and OCs spring from my own imagination. As always, thanks to Esperanta, without whom all of this would be a lot harder to read. On to complete "Pixels in the Night" now!

**Watching the Watchers**

**Chapter Eighteen**

**Epilogue, Part Three: Thursday**

**The Word from Justice **

**11:15 AM**

**Erin Strauss**

Her immediate superior, an ambitious, canny career bureaucrat named Pikeman, called her in to Quantico on Thursday, a full three days after her life had gone mad. Her vehicle was now available for release and pickup, he informed her, and he hoped that they could meet while she was there, '_at your convenience—say, at eleven-fifteen.'_

Which didn't sound like her convenience at all, but _did_ sound just like Charlie Pikeman, who was known (in hushed whispers, when that vindictive individual was safely out of earshot) as "the Chucky-Doll." Office gossip was that he compensated for his failure to participate in the arrest of even a single UNSUB by taking down agents deemed lacking in the critical suck-up factor. His floor, they said, was carpeted in the scalps of better men whom Chucky-Doll had submerged in a sea of petty directives and then held down until their ambition or their pride died, one or the other.

Erin Strauss was smart, savvy, and had sufficient suck-up to keep Charlie Pikeman confident that she posed no threat to him. She dressed in her professional best and had her daughter Krystal drive her to Quantico. There she signed a mind-numbing array of forms in order to get her car back. Once that was accomplished and she was assured of a way to get home, she kissed her daughter goodbye and took the elevator to Pikeman's level of the building.

"Ah, Strauss," he said, not rising from his desk as she entered his office. "Is everything A-OK with your car?"

"It is," she replied.

"Won't you have a seat?" Charlie Pikeman urged. "This thing that happened to you, it was just dreadful."

"It was. It still is."

"Well, help is on the way," the Chucky-Doll assured her, and produced yet another stack of official forms. "As you can see, this will absolve you, Erin Strauss, of any proven complicity in the efforts to falsify evidence against—"

"Let's get something straight," Erin hissed, leaning forward with an intensity that indicated she was fresh out of suck-up. "There's no _'proven'_ because there's no _'complicity,'_ because the only evidence that was falsified was against _our own agents_. Did you get that part, _Agent_ Pikeman? The part where evidence indicates unmistakably that the agents of the BAU were the victims here, and not the perpetrators?"

"Yes, of course," he said, his urbanity slipping just the tiniest bit. "At this time there seems to be no credible evidence tying you personally to this mess."

"Well let's just hope so, shall we?" she blurted. "Since Justice has more than enough evidence that this was a set-up from beginning to end."

Pikeman whitened, and anger flared in his eyes. "At this point in the investigation, evidence does seem to indicate—"

"No 'at this point,' no 'seems to indicate,'" Erin said, leaning forward and matching Pikeman's anger, flash for flash. "It is an incontrovertible fact. The sun rises in the east. Two and two are four. E equals MC squared. And the agents and chief of the BAU were framed. I will not tolerate any slippery language regarding this, Pikeman." She slammed a hand down on the surface of his desk. "Not a single wiggle-word. If that sheaf of papers includes words like _alleged_ and _at this time_ and _inconclusive_, then you can just send them back out and get them retyped, because _I will not sign them_. Are we clear?"

Pikeman wisely backed off a little. "I'm sure we can work something out," he said smoothly. "Take a few minutes," he urged. "Look it over, note whatever emendations you think best."

She did so. Most of it was meaningless boilerplate, but two pages were literally blue with ink from her ballpoint before she was fully satisfied with them. Pikeman accepted the pages back and sent them out for some word-processing drone to re-key to her satisfaction.

Erin was beginning to think that she'd somehow managed to win this one, when abruptly the senior bureaucrat gave her a toothy smile.

"If it suits your schedule," he said, "I'll have your BAU folks called in for a meeting tomorrow afternoon. You can chair the meeting, issue apologies as needed, and get their signatures on the release forms."

Instantly, Strauss was on her feet. "_'Issue apologies as needed'?_" she said, her voice as cold as her eyes. "I haven't even received my own apology. There's no way in hell that I'm going to sit there and sing the company line on this one, Pikeman. If anyone in the world other than you had reviewed the charges when they first crossed your desk, this whole situation would have been unnecessary. Really," she added, her voice taking on a dangerous edge. "It was that clear, it was that obvious. It was that sloppily documented.

"But no, supporting your troops just doesn't come naturally to you," she continued. "You're far better at calling them out. The old 'praise in public and punish in private' thing, it means nothing to you. It's all about stomping on your underlings. Well, let me tell you what you're going to do, Chucky-Doll."

Pikeman stared at her in something that might have been horror.

"You—and I hope you have the balls to do it yourself and not delegate it to some other poor fool—you will go out into the big wide world with your forms, and you will visit each of those agents. Call it your own door-to-door 'Apology Tour.' You'll suck it up and walk them through the forms. They deserve nothing less."

"Agent Strauss, this is insubordination."

If she had any caution left, she threw it to the winds. "Then so be it."

**~ o ~**

**1:22 PM**

**Aaron Hotchner **

The summons from Division Chief Pikeman had come shortly before noon on a lazy day when Hotch was just starting to get into the advantages of this whole suspended-with-pay thing, being in his third consecutive day of suspension that didn't involve car chases, shootouts, or being jailed.

He'd known it was too good to last, though, so he suited up and caught a ride from Jamie, his lawyer. Jamie was unwilling to let his client face any of his accusers without representation, but after he'd hovered around long enough to confirm that Aaron had possession of his car again, he reluctantly left Hotch on his own.

Frankly, Hotchner preferred to face the Chief by himself. He could think of only two reasons he might be ordered into Charles Pikeman's presence: Pikeman was going to apologize, or Pikeman was going to shout at him. Since Chucky-Doll wasn't the apologizing type, shouting was probably on the menu, and Aaron preferred to get yelled at in private.

"Ah, Agent Hotchner," the bureaucrat said when he knocked on Pikeman's door.

"Chief," Hotchner said without enthusiasm.

"Won't you have a seat?" Pikeman urged. "We haven't had a meaningful chat in a long time, have we, Hotchner?"

Because there was just conceivably an apology in the offing, Hotch said nothing about _never_ having had a meaningful conversation with the Chucky-Doll. "It's been a while," he said in a neutral tone.

"I've been following your career with interest," Pikeman confided. "You're amassing quite a reputation." When Hotchner didn't immediately leap in to thank him, Pikeman lost a bit of his rhythm, but none of his determination. "And I thought you should know that there are—shall we say, _openings_, for a man of your caliber who knows what's what."

_Excuse me? _The only opening in the gap between Pikeman's pay grade and his own was at the moment occupied by Erin ("Bride of Chucky") Strauss. Hotch decided that, again, the best response was to say nothing.

"I have here some release forms for your team," the Chucky-Doll continued with an urbane chuckle. "Nothing dramatic, just simple acknowledgments, clearing the decks, so to speak, so everyone can get back on the same page and the same team." He offered a _we're-all-in-this-together_ smile of camaraderie that didn't fool Hotchner for so much as an instant.

"'Back on the same page'?" Aaron echoed gently. "'Back on the same team'?"

"Yes, of course," Director Pikeman said with a big brave smile that had _nada_ in the way of sincerity behind it—and yet, curiously, a certain hint of—_desperation_?

Aaron accepted the stack of releases and reviewed them rapidly and with a growing sense of dismay. Who the hell had vetted these monstrosities? Surely nobody with any legal skill. The Team—and Hotchner himself—would not only be absolving the Bureau of any responsibility for what had happened, but also all but tendering an apology to Pikeman and the Bureau for all the ensuing confusion.

"I'll arrange a meeting for your people tomorrow," the Chucky-Doll said, perhaps a little too eagerly. "You can present the releases to—"

"No," Hotchner said, barely containing his outrage. There was no end to the crap that he was prepared to take to protect his Team, but there was no way in hell he would stand by and let them take responsibility for Pikeman's incompetence. "No meeting."

And that was when he put two and two together.

_He's already presented this to Erin,_ he realized. _He presented it to her, and she refused to chair this meeting._

He recalled with a private smile the chain-smoking slattern in halter-top, curlers, and stretch pants who'd baffled the team sent to Garcia's place.

_The Bride of Chucky has grown a spine and claws,_ he realized, and he was no longer able to keep the grin off his face.

"This is absolutely unacceptable," he told Pikeman. "My people deserve better than this. They owe nobody—_nobody—_an apology, let alone you. I'm not addressing them in any meeting. If I have to, I'll call them and tell them to disregard your invitation. If you had any _cojones_ at all, you'd be apologizing to them. Has Legal seen this crap, or did you draw it up yourself?"

Pikeman said nothing, but his expression gave him away.

"Whatever Chief Strauss said," Hotchner said, as he rose to his feet and tossed the sheaf of releases back on Pikeman's desk, "I'm saying the same thing, sir. Have a nice day."

"Agent Hotchner!" Pikeman called as Hotch left.

He turned and glared. "Sir?"

Pikeman glowered right back at him. "She was disrespectful, insubordinate, and thoroughly unprofessional."

Hotchner nodded curtly. "That's good to hear."

**~ o ~**

**2:44 PM**

**David Rossi**

His phone buzzed while he was in the produce section of the supermarket, examining a pair of eggplants with a critical eye. He eyed the Caller ID on the faceplate—it was his attorney—and said, "Yeah, Donnie, what's up?"

"You might want to get home," Donnie said. "Just a little heads-up that some powers from Justice are planning to drop by your place shortly."

Rossi checked the time and said, "OK, I can be home in forty minutes, more or less."

"Can you make it faster?"

"Donnie, you intrigue me," Rossi said with a grin. "What can be so important that I should rush home from planning my dinner?"

"Look, Dave, all I'm saying is that weird things are happening, OK? And you might want to be ahead of the curve on this, OK?"

Rossi regretfully rejected another eggplant: too ripe. "Fine," he said with a sigh. "I'll be home by three-fifteen."

**~ o ~**

**2:49 PM**

**Penelope Garcia**

Marvin the lawyer was back at her door, short and pudgy and endlessly cheerful.

"I've gone through all the lists," she assured him. "They've returned everything."

"That's great," he told her. "I'm here because I got a heads-up from the DoJ that the Bureau is sending a rep over here, and I should ensure that your rights are protected."

"Technically," she said, "I'm the only person on the Team who isn't supervisory, and I can get an Association rep over here."

"Just following orders, Ms. Garcia," he said, with an apologetic shrug.

She wanted to ask, _But whose orders? _She decided that could wait. She opened the door wide. "Come on in then," she said. "I'll make some coffee."

But no sooner did she have him seated than her buzzer sounded again. With a sigh, she returned to the door and opened it wide.

An enormous man in an ill-fitting blue suit almost filled her doorway. "Justice," he growled, and flashed his creds. The smaller man, far better dressed, displayed Bureau creds so fast she barely managed to read the name. There was something familiar about his toothy and insincere smile.

Charles Pikeman? Division Chief _Pikeman_ was at the door to her apartment?

"On behalf of everyone at the Department of Justice, and the Bureau in particular," Pikeman said in a hurried monotone, "I'd like to apologize for the situation that, ah, effectuated on Monday of this week—"

_'Situation that effectuated'? That isn't even really English…._

Pikeman thrust a ballpoint pen and some forms on a clipboard at her, evidently under the charming misapprehension that she'd sign them without reading them. Even if the huge man hadn't wrinkled his brow and frowned at her, even if Marvin hadn't already popped out of his chair, if he hadn't already been hovering at her side, visibly itching to get his hands on those documents, she would never have been that stupid.

With the sweetest smile she could summon, she handed the papers to the lawyer. He took them with a sweet smile of his own.

Nobody offered Pikeman a seat or a cup of coffee. Nobody offered the big guy one either, but he didn't seem interested in anything much other than watching Pikeman like an overgrown hawk. He just loomed over the Division Chief and occasionally let a grim smile flash across his forbidding features.

**~ o ~**

**3:22 PM**

**David Rossi**

Two dark, official-looking sedans pulled up in front of his house, each with only a driver, no passenger. Dave wondered why they hadn't come together until Charles Pikeman climbed out of one—and Victor Wozniak climbed out of the other.

No. Those two didn't strike him as likely to be best buddies.

The Chucky-Doll bustled officiously up the walkway with Wozniak lumbering behind him, a dangerously amused look on his face.

Rossi retrieved a carton from his cupboards, tore open a plastic bag, and grabbed a handful of the bag's contents. Then he flung his door open and beamed at the self-important little jerk ascending the front steps. "Welcome!" he caroled. "You're a few days early, but those are great costumes!" He thrust a double fistful of miniature candy bars at them. "Where are your treat bags?"

Pikeman said nothing.

Wozniak smiled thinly. "Nah, I'm just accompanying him. Somebody evidently thought that having a responsible adult along would ensure that everything went smoothly."

Dave beamed. "Come on in, boys."

**~ o ~**

**3:41 PM**

**Emily Prentiss**

Her Caller ID indicated that it was Dave Rossi on the phone. "Hey, hi," she said. "What's up?"

"You'll never guess who was here a while ago with a whole clipboard of releases and the most inept, the saddest excuse for an apology you're likely ever to hear," the senior profiler said, and she could hear the amusement in his voice.

"Oh, tell me it was Pikeman," Emily breathed into her mobile.

"The same. And somebody sicced Wozniak on him to make sure he plays by the rules."

"Wozniak? But—isn't he with DoJ? And isn't he an interrogator?"

"He has one of those—_flexible_ job descriptions," said Rossi. "He goes wherever he's needed."

"That's—hang on, someone's at my door now," Emily said.

She rang off with Dave and buzzed her visitors upstairs.

"Well, look at you!" she said to her visitors as they stalked down the hall. "Just the cutest little munchkins I've seen so far!"

"Not amusing," Pikeman replied in sour tones. He held out a clipboard. "Some forms for you to review and sign."

"And?" she prompted.

He looked puzzled. "And?" he repeated uncertainly.

"You didn't say 'Trick or Treat!'"

Pikeman's lips tightened. "This has ceased to be funny," he snapped. "It wasn't even amusing the first time."

Prentiss glanced at Wozniak, who shrugged and said, "I think it's hilarious, myself."

**~ o ~**

**5:27 PM**

**Derek Morgan**

Once he and Norma had reviewed the language of the releases, including the one that would enable him to pick up his car from Quantico, he scrawled his name in five separate places and handed the clipboard back to the Chucky-Doll.

Unlike Prentiss, unlike Rossi, Morgan had felt no urge to torment the bringer of the apology, such as it was—but he did have some questions.

"What I want to know," he said, keeping his tone civil, "is who drew up the release?"

"It was—" Pikeman began cautiously, his tone uncharacteristically hesitant, "—a bit of a group effort. Basic legal boilerplate, then I, ah, felt it might be useful to incorporate some—modest suggestions tendered by other members of the department. This was, after all, quite an—unusual situation."

"Not quite that unusual," Morgan said. "Ethics and Internal Affairs, Office of Professional Responsibility, they've dealt with alleged rogue behaviors for years. Even frame-ups aren't unheard of. Nothing there that takes a committee to create."

He'd already spoken to Norma about it, and she'd conferred with Garcia's, Rossi's, Hotch's, and Strauss's attorneys and he already knew that the release was forty percent boilerplate, ten percent Pikeman, forty percent Aaron Hotchner, and a fluffy ten percent whipped cream courtesy of Erin Strauss.

_OK, he just preferred to torment the guy in a different way. _

**~ o ~**

**10:30 PM**

**Spencer Reid**

Considering that the party had been thrown together almost literally at the last minute did nothing to detract from its sheer awesomeness. Julian had opened up his apartment at the Watergate Complex for the venue. Some little bitty guy in a chauffeur's uniform (who wore more handguns than Morgan) had commandeered the kitchen and spun from oven to range top to microwave like a possessed chimp, banging metal on metal and filling the place with amazing aromas.

It had started out Team only, but of course they'd had to include Erin and JJ, which meant that Will and Kevin had to be invited. Emily had brought Ernesto, who'd brought the night's chef. Morgan wanted to ring his lawyer—apparently, they'd begun dating—so gradually a bunch of other lawyers had been included, and even a gigantic interrogator from the DoJ. Garcia had also invited one of the Bureau guys who'd searched her apartment, who had brought his boyfriend—who had brought his karaoke setup. Then Julian had invited the dudes from two floors down who played in—_really_—a State-Department-backed alt-punk band.

They'd been celebrating for the better part of two hours now. Two couples—Derek Morgan and his lawyer, Norma, and JJ and Will—were slow dancing, dreamy-eyed, to some Sicilian ballad that Dave Rossi and Ernesto Cavallieri were crooning. It sounded romantic, but Reid had picked up a little bit of the language from hanging around Julian, and he was pretty sure that an incontinent goat featured prominently in it. He looked around to confirm this notion with Emily Prentiss, but she and Julian were out on the terrace with a couple lawyers and everyone was laughing.

Hotch, Garcia, and the enormous interrogator hovered over the makeshift buffet, apparently trying to guess what was in some of the fare the chauffeur had laid out. Reid himself was feeling the effects of more alcohol than he usually allowed himself.

"Hey." Reid looked up, and it was Erin Strauss, neither in business wear nor in her Brandy Mae getup. She was wearing something festive and slinky and glittery and she looked pretty damned pleased with herself. She dropped down onto the arm of the chair where he sat.

"It's been—a week," she said. Her voice reflected her own blood alcohol level.

"It sure has."

"Doctor Reid."

"Mm?"

"Do you have your hand on my butt?"

He looked. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Guess I do. Should I move it?"

She settled in closer against him, or maybe she was just sliding sideways. It was hard to tell. "Oh—eventually." She stared off at nothing for a minute, then said, "I think we did pretty well."

"We did," he said. "We made a pretty good team."

_Finis_


End file.
